The strain was not in any single moment.

It was in the accumulation, in keeping my hand relaxed in his for four hours, in laughing at the right beat, in not once letting my eyes travel three rows back to where my brother sat pretending to sleep.

Because I knew what was waiting.

Sarah had not told me the details — she’d told me only to stay calm and walk off the plane — but I knew my friend, and I knew the machinery she had set in motion, and I knew that somewhere over the dark middle of the country, while my husband debated the merits of cedar versus composite decking, a group of federal agents was arriving at a gate in Chicago to wait for him.

I pictured them sometimes, over those hours, though I had no face to give them — people in a terminal I knew well, checking a flight number, holding a folder with my husband’s name on it, waiting for a plane full of vacationers to deliver one more passenger than it knew it carried.