The Man I Met on the Redeye to Denver Was Wearing My Dead Husband’s Watch

Part 2: What He Never Told Me

I don’t remember the rest of the flight landing.

I remember the man, whose name turned out to be Peter, ordering me a small bottle of white wine from the flight attendant and paying for it in cash because my hands wouldn’t work my phone. I remember him not saying anything for a long time, just sitting next to me while I stared at that photograph on his phone and tried to make my brain accept what my eyes were doing.

The second ring was thinner than mine. Rose gold, not yellow. There was a small engraving on the inside edge I couldn’t quite read in the photo.

“When was this taken,” I finally said.

“July. Four years ago. My cabin in Estes Park.”

Four years ago. Daniel had been in Estes Park in July four years ago. He’d told me it was a work retreat. He’d come home with a sunburn on his nose and a coffee mug that said *Rocky Mountain High* and a distracted, faraway quality that had lasted about a week and then gone away, the way things did with Daniel.

“How long,” I said.

Peter looked at his hands.

“Six years,” he said. “On and off. Mostly on.”

I did the math. Six years back from his death was 2017. We had been married nine years at that point. I had been trying to get pregnant. We had painted the second bedroom a soft yellow and called it the nursery, even though there was no baby yet, because Daniel said naming things made them real.

“He told me he loved me,” Peter said quietly. “He also told me he loved you. He never lied about you. He talked about you all the time.”

“That is somehow worse.”

“I know.”

The plane touched down. People started standing up and pulling bags from overhead bins with that mindless herd urgency they always have, like the plane is on fire, and Peter and I just sat there, letting them go, letting the whole cabin empty around us.

“He was going to tell you,” Peter said. “The week he died. He’d told me. He said, *I can’t keep doing this to her, Pete. She deserves to know. She deserves a chance to decide.* We had a plan. He was going to tell you on that Saturday. He died on the Tuesday.”

I don’t know what my face did. Something. Peter reached into his jacket and pulled out a business card and set it on my tray table.

“I’m not going to bother you,” he said. “I never wanted to know you. I mean that in the kindest way I can. But you clearly didn’t know I existed either, and I’ve been carrying that around for two years thinking you did, thinking you’d chosen to erase me from the funeral and the obituary and everything, and now I understand you didn’t. So. I’m sorry. And if you ever want to know anything, anything at all, I’ll answer. Once. And then I’ll leave you alone.”

He got his bag. He walked off the plane.

I sat there until a flight attendant asked me if I was all right.

—

I didn’t call him for three months.

I did other things instead. I went home to our house in Wash Park and I opened Daniel’s top dresser drawer and I took out the Hamilton Khaki Field and I turned it over in my hand for about forty-five minutes.

The scratch at the four was there. Right where it should be.

So which watch had Peter been wearing.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the watch in my hand and understood, slowly, that Daniel had bought two. One for himself. One for Peter. Matching. Scratched the same way, probably, or scratched to match, or Peter had scratched his own on purpose after Daniel died, I would never know. Two identical watches, one in each life, one on each wrist, and Daniel had walked between those two wrists for six years and I had never once suspected anything.

Actually, that wasn’t true.

I sat with the watch and let myself remember the Sundays he went for long runs and came back smelling like a shower that wasn’t ours. The phone that lived face down on the counter. The way he’d started sleeping on his stomach with one arm tucked under the pillow, like he was hiding something even in sleep. I had noticed all of it and I had also un-noticed all of it, because I had wanted the yellow nursery more than I wanted the truth.

I found his laptop in the closet. I hadn’t opened it since he died. His mother had asked me to send her his photos and I had said I would and then I hadn’t been able to make myself do it, and she had never asked again, which was the kind of thing she did, which was one of the things I loved about her.

The password was still our anniversary.

There were photos of Peter going back years. Hundreds of them. Peter on a bicycle. Peter asleep with a book on his chest. Peter on the porch of that cabin, laughing, with mountains behind him.

There were also photos of me. More of me, actually. Me in the kitchen. Me reading. Me on the beach in Mexico the winter my hair was short. Me on our wedding day, twenty-eight years old, looking at the camera like the world was a promise someone was keeping.

He had loved both of us. That was the part I couldn’t make fit. I kept trying to make it not true, kept trying to sort the photographs into a hierarchy where one of us was real and the other was a symptom, and the photographs would not do it.

I called Peter in October.

“I want to see the cabin,” I said.

He was quiet on the phone for a long time.

“Okay,” he said.

—

Estes Park in October is the kind of beautiful that hurts. Aspens gone gold, the air thin and sharp, elk in the meadows like they own them, which I guess they do. Peter picked me up at a diner in town and drove me up a switchback road in a Subaru that smelled like dog.

“Cooper,” he said, catching me looking at the back seat. “He’s at my sister’s.”

“Daniel wanted a dog,” I said. “I said no. I was allergic.”

“You’re allergic to dogs?”

“No. I just didn’t want one. I lied about it for eleven years.”

Peter glanced at me. Something like a smile happened at the edge of his mouth and then thought better of itself.

“He got to have a dog up here,” he said. “Half the time, anyway. He loved Cooper.”

“Good,” I said. And meant it. And also didn’t.

The cabin was small and honest. A single room with a woodstove and a loft, a porch that looked out over a valley, a kitchen the size of a closet. There was a mug on the drying rack that said *Rocky Mountain High*. I laughed out loud when I saw it, and Peter looked confused, and I couldn’t explain.

He’d built a fire. He’d made coffee. He had clearly rehearsed being kind to me, and it was working, and I resented him for it, and then I stopped resenting him for it, because none of this was his fault either.

We sat on the porch with blankets over our knees. He didn’t try to fill the silence, which I appreciated.

“Tell me one thing about him I didn’t know,” I finally said.

He thought about it. “He was scared of horses.”

“He was not.”

“He was terrified. There’s a stable down the road, they do trail rides, I took him once and he almost cried getting on the animal. He never told you?”

“He rode horses on our honeymoon. In Costa Rica. He said he loved it.”

“He lied,” Peter said gently. “He lied to make you happy. That was, that was kind of his whole thing. Making the person in front of him happy.”

I sat with that.

It was a small thing. A horse. A honeymoon ten years ago. But it was the first time since the flight that I understood, all the way down, that the man I had been married to had been performing for me. Not maliciously. Not even unkindly. Just constantly. He had been giving me a version of himself he thought I wanted, and he had been giving Peter a different version, and somewhere underneath both of those versions there had been an actual person I had apparently never met.

“Did he perform for you too?” I asked.

Peter considered this for a long time.

“Yes,” he said. “Just about different things.”

The sun was going down behind the ridge. The valley was filling up with that blue shadow that mountains make, and somewhere a long way off an elk was making its weird brass-instrument sound, and I thought, *I’m sitting on my dead husband’s boyfriend’s porch drinking his coffee out of his mug and I am not, actually, going to die from this.*

“Peter,” I said. “Can I ask you something awful.”

“Sure.”

“Did he ever say which of us he was going to pick?”

Peter didn’t answer for a long time. Long enough that I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me. The fire crackled inside through the open door. My coffee went cold in the mug.

Then he took a breath like a man about to jump off something.

“He wasn’t going to pick, exactly,” he said. “That’s, that’s the thing I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you since the plane.”

—