There was a woman ahead of me struggling to fit a bag in an overhead bin, and I waited behind her, patient, my boarding pass in my hand, while three feet away my husband slowly registered that the shape moving toward him in the aisle was me.

I watched it arrive on his face in stages — first a flicker of ordinary recognition, the automatic half-smile you give a familiar face, before his brain caught up and understood that this face could not, must not, be on this plane.

Then the smile fell off.

Then the color went.

By the time the woman ahead of me got her bag settled and moved on, Vaughan Ferro looked like a man watching the floor open under his chair, and I stepped forward into the space she’d left and stopped beside Row 7 as though I had all the time in the world.

“Adaora?” It came out cracked.