“I’d like everyone to help me congratulate Chloe Ruiz,” Luca said, “who is sitting in seat 3B.”

I froze, half-risen from my seat.

“Chloe,” my husband’s voice continued, warm and public and steady now, “from the moment you walked into my life, everything changed.

I can’t wait to start our new life together in Chicago.”

I sank slowly back down into my seat.

The smile drained off Leo’s face, and off mine, in the same instant, because in the same instant we both understood the same impossible thing: that Luca’s announcement had nothing to do with us at all.

That the very special person who meant everything to him, the one he was proposing to over the speakers of his own aircraft with his wife and son sitting twenty-five rows behind him, was a woman named Chloe Ruiz in seat 3B, in first class, whom I had never heard him mention.