The Man Who Sat Next to Me on Flight 227 Was Wearing My Dead Husband’s Watch

Part 1

The man in seat 14B was wearing my dead husband’s watch.

Not a similar watch. Not the same model. That watch. The Omega Seamaster with the hairline scratch across the four o’clock marker, the one Daniel got the summer he tried to fix our fence himself and slipped with a claw hammer.

I stared at his wrist for the entire boarding announcement. Denver to Portland, a Tuesday afternoon, and I could not make my mouth work.

Daniel had been dead for two years and eight months. The watch had gone into the ocean with him off the coast of Big Sur, along with the rental kayak and, according to the coast guard, most of a small storm front nobody had predicted.

They never found the body. They never found the watch.

“You’re staring.”

The man in 14B said it without looking at me. He was maybe fifty, dark hair going silver at the temples, a book open on his tray table. British accent, soft.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Your watch. It looks exactly like one my husband used to wear.”

He glanced down at it like he’d forgotten it was there. “This old thing? Picked it up at an estate sale in San Francisco. Sentimental value for someone once, I imagine.”

Estate sale. San Francisco.

We had lived in San Francisco.

“When?” I said. My voice came out too sharp. A woman across the aisle looked up from her phone.

He turned to me for the first time. Gray eyes, careful. “About two years ago. Why?”

I opened my mouth to answer and nothing came out.

The flight attendant asked us to stow our items. He closed his book. I watched his hands, the way he moved the watch face slightly to the inside of his wrist, a small habit, an unconscious one.

Daniel used to do that. Exactly that. When he was nervous.

“Ma’am? Your bag.”

I shoved my tote under the seat in front of me and tried to breathe through my nose. Four hours to Portland. Four hours next to a stranger wearing my husband’s watch, doing my husband’s tic, sitting close enough that I could smell his aftershave, which was not Daniel’s aftershave, which was something I had never smelled before and which was, somehow, the only thing keeping me from crying.

We taxied. We took off. He read his book. I sat with my hands folded so tightly the knuckles went white, and I thought about the last morning.

The last morning, Daniel had kissed the top of my head and said he’d be back by dinner. He had packed a thermos. He had told me he loved me in the specific, casual way of a man who assumed he’d say it again a thousand more times. And then he had driven three hours south to meet a college friend I had never met, whose name I only learned from the police report, and he had gotten into a kayak and he had not come home.

The college friend had survived. His name was Peter Ashford. He had called me from a hospital bed in Monterey, sobbing so hard I couldn’t understand him, saying the wave came from nowhere, saying he’d tried to reach Daniel, saying he was so, so sorry.

I had never met Peter Ashford. Daniel had mentioned him maybe twice in fifteen years of marriage.

Somewhere over Nevada, the man in 14B turned a page and I saw his book. It was in French. He tracked the lines with one finger.

I said, without planning to, “What was the name on the estate sale?”

He didn’t look up. “I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember.”

“It was two years ago.”

“It’s a five-thousand-dollar watch.”

Now he looked up. Something moved behind his eyes, quick, and then it was gone, replaced by a polite, closed smile.

“I paid four hundred for it,” he said. “The family was desperate. That’s how estate sales work.”

He went back to his book.

I sat there with my hands in my lap and thought: he is lying. He is lying about something and I don’t know which thing yet.

The seatbelt sign chimed off. He set his book down and stood to get something from the overhead bin, and as he stretched, the cuff of his shirt rode up, and I saw the inside of his wrist.

There was a small tattoo there. Three letters. Faded, home-done, the kind of thing a teenager might do with a needle and a bottle of India ink.

The letters were EMH.

My husband’s initials.

Edward Marcus Halloran.