This Is Not How It Ends(2)

The man continued, every word a struggle. “It’s been so long since we’ve, since I’ve, actually had to use that thing . . .” He took off his cap and ran a hand through his hair. The same dark shadow lined his jaw.

Jimmy squirmed. The trickle of customers broke apart, careful to step over the backpack. The young boy’s eyes were a similar green to his father’s, though his hair was lighter. A faint spray of freckles covered his nose and cheeks.

Sunny was pacing: I ordered him to sit, and he tried, but he alternated from sit to stand. I stroked the boy’s leg where I’d just injected him, and the steady motion calmed me. I was still holding the empty pen, and the man extended his hand for me to drop it in his palm.

That’s when I noticed my bare finger. The ring that Philip had just given me was gone.

An icy cold fear shot through my body while I searched the ground. The man was watching me, following my desperation. The ring must have been flung off in all the commotion. Philip had warned me to have it sized, but I’d been too busy admiring it. The man could tell that whatever I was looking for was important. He searched, too, and locked on something nearby, a shiny glare from beneath a shelf of canned corn.

He reached across the aisle, holding Jimmy’s head, and handed me the brilliant diamond. He watched me place it back on my finger, and soon the wails of screeching sirens filled the air. First responders surrounded us. They poked and prodded and touched while Jimmy sat patiently.

Sunny watched over the frail child as he often did for me, his paw resting against the boy’s shoulder. Jimmy slowly patted his soft ears, smiling at me, and then at Sunny. His teeth were a perfect pearly white.

The blurry train continued. There was a stretcher. Soon Jimmy was on it. His dad—they’d called him Ben—slowly stood up.

Sunny and I followed the stretcher outside, where the morning sun cast a blinding glow. They were loading Jimmy into the back of the van, when a paramedic who looked a lot like Denzel Washington urged me inside. “The boy needs his mother,” he said.

I looked at the man called Ben, but he hadn’t heard.

“I’m not his mother.”

Jimmy said something then, his gravelly voice a scratch against the breeze.

The paramedic—I wish he had a name—said, “He wants to know if you’ll bring the dog . . .”

I stepped back, creating necessary distance between us. “I can’t . . . I don’t even know these people . . .” But it didn’t feel right to leave. Sunny agreed, tugging me toward the open truck, clawing at the dirt until a plume of dust rose up.

“Normally it’s against regulations, but I’ll make an exception . . . for the boy,” he said.

“I can’t,” I repeated, cursing myself for needing honey that morning. For knowing I wouldn’t be home when Philip walked through the door.

From the look on his face, Ben was biting back a string of emotions, and the glaring vulnerability reached inside me. Without thinking, I let Sunny pull me forward, pushing aside thoughts of Philip. Philip, whose red-eye from Los Angeles would be arriving in Miami any minute. Philip, who would be wondering where I was, expecting our reunion—intimate and often sweet. Instead, I thought of this little boy, innocent and fresh-faced like any one of my former students, the ones whose needs had always surpassed my own. The familiar twinge beckoned me to act, and soon I was inside the vehicle.





CHAPTER 2

May 2016, Back Then

United Airlines Flight 517 from Miami, Florida, to Kansas City, Missouri

Philip likes to tell the story of how we first met. He calls it a combination of fate and circumstance, and I chuckle because it was really the result of an equipment change at one of the country’s busiest airports. I shouldn’t have been flying that rainy day. And Priscilla, the principal at the school where I taught, shouldn’t have insisted I attend a professional development workshop so close to final exams—all the way in Coral Gables—but I could never say no to Priscilla or her suggestions for personal enrichment. It meant extra work, but I’d always been able to juggle.

I hadn’t been to Miami before, and the city’s vibrancy clung to me like the steamy weather. Perhaps it was the information provided in the seminars—innovative ways to inspire the kids—that had me buoyant and unfazed by the humidity. I was flying back to Kansas City that afternoon. The local news had predicted rain, but we were greeted with far worse. Hard balls of hail crashed against the roof of my Uber, and threatening tides flooded the streets. As I arrived at the airport, the digital monitors buzzed with delays, and when our incoming plane diverted to West Palm Beach, we were forced to board a different plane.

I took my seat in row thirteen, knowing full well the associated superstitions. Passengers were winding down the aisle, the sound of their shuffling mixing with the outside storms. Strapping myself into the window seat, I felt cautiously optimistic that the seat between me and the elderly woman on the aisle would remain empty.

Until Philip came crashing down the narrow walkway.

It’s in poor taste, I might add, to describe this man’s entrance into my world, on a plane, as a crash, but it fit. Philip was pissed. His sculpted cheeks were lit up, the lips puckered, and his brilliant blue eyes baffled. If he wasn’t snapping at the flight attendant, I’d have said he was handsome like the men on Game of Thrones, but the flared nostrils mixed with a testy arrogance stripped him, and me, of any kindness.