Departure: the same morning as his imaginary conference.

I read it four times.

Not because it was complicated — it was the plainest thing in the world, a machine-printed itinerary — but because my mind kept trying to find the version where it wasn’t what it was.

A colleague, maybe.

A client with a plus-one.

A trip he’d tell me about tonight.

I stood in the kitchen with the tablet in my hands and watched my own brain do the work it had been doing for months, reaching for the innocent story, and this time there was no innocent story to reach.

Two passengers.

One of them was not going to be me.

The Chicago he had described that morning, with the client dinners and the early flight, was sitting in his mouth like a stone, and here on the screen was the Miami he had actually booked.

There is a specific silence that falls when a lie you’ve half-suspected turns solid in your hands.

Everything in the room got very quiet and very sharp-edged, and I noticed, distantly, that I was not going to cry, and that the not-crying meant something had already changed in me that I did not yet have a name for.

Chapter 2 — Seat 7C

I didn’t scream.