The flight attendant smiled when she took the little gold box from my hands.

“Oh, that’s so sweet,” she said. “Are they celebrating something?”

“You could say that,” I told her.

She walked it up the aisle toward row two. I watched her the whole way. I watched her bend down and hand it to the blonde woman in the window seat, and say something with a big smile, and point vaguely toward the back of the plane.

The blonde woman laughed and took the box. The man beside her leaned in to look.

They were both smiling.

Until they opened it.

I was sitting in row twenty-seven, watching the whole thing over the tops of two dozen heads.

The man’s face turned bright red. Not pink. Red, like a stop sign, all the way up to his hairline.

And the woman jumped up out of her seat so fast she hit her head on the overhead bin. She clapped a hand over her mouth and shoved past him into the aisle and ran for the restroom at the front of the plane.

The door slammed behind her.

Every head on that airplane turned around to look.

And I sat very still in row twenty-seven, with my hands folded in my lap and my heart pounding so hard I thought the people next to me could hear it.

That man was my husband.

That woman was my best friend.

And until about forty minutes earlier, I’d had no idea either one of them was on my flight.

---

Let me back up.

---

My name is Laura. I’m forty-three years old. I’ve been married to Ryan Hollis for eighteen years.

We have three kids. Emma is sixteen and thinks she knows everything. Jake is thirteen and only communicates in grunts and requests for food. Lily is nine and still crawls into our bed when there’s a thunderstorm.

We live in a two-story house in a suburb outside of Columbus, Ohio, with a basketball hoop over the garage, a dog named Pickles who eats socks, and a kitchen that’s always too small at dinnertime.

It’s a normal life. I liked it. I thought I had a good one.

---

Ryan works in sales for a medical equipment company. Regional manager. It’s a good job, and it pays well, but it means he travels constantly. Three, sometimes four times a month. Atlanta. Denver. Dallas. Phoenix. Chicago, mostly. Chicago was his big territory.

When the kids were little, it was hard. I’d be alone with a baby with an ear infection and a toddler with the stomach flu, and Ryan would be calling from a hotel in Minneapolis saying, “I wish I was there, babe.”

But you get used to it. After eighteen years, it was just the shape of our life.

Ryan would pack on Sunday nights. I’d make sure he had clean shirts. He’d kiss the kids goodbye in the morning. He’d text me from the airport. He’d call every night around nine. How was everybody? What did Lily do today? Did Jake eat any vegetables?

He’d come home on Thursday or Friday with a little gift from the airport. A Chicago Cubs keychain for Jake. A snow globe for Lily. Fancy chocolates for me.

The kids missed him terribly when he was gone. Lily used to sleep in one of his T-shirts.

So did I, sometimes. I never told anybody that.