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

Part 2: What the Watch Knew

I don’t remember the rest of the flight. I know I sat there. I know he sat down. I know at some point a flight attendant asked if I wanted anything to drink and I said no, and my voice sounded like it was coming from another woman in another row.

Edward Marcus Halloran.

That was my husband’s full name. Edward on his birth certificate, Marcus after his grandfather, Halloran from a father who left when he was four. Nobody called him Edward. His mother had started calling him Daniel when he was six because his stepfather’s name was Edward and she didn’t want the house confused. It stuck. By high school, nobody but the DMV knew the name Edward.

The tattoo on the man’s wrist was old. Twenty years old, maybe more. Faded to the bluish-gray of ink that had been under skin a long time.

Daniel had a tattoo on the inside of his wrist. Same spot. Three letters. EMH.

He’d gotten it at seventeen, he told me once, in a friend’s basement in Sacramento, drunk on stolen vodka and half-convinced he was going to become a poet. He’d shown it to me on our second date, held his wrist up under the restaurant light, said, “This is the only stupid thing I’ve done that I still like.”

I asked him once why he never got it removed. He said, “Because it reminds me I used to be someone who did stupid things. I miss that guy sometimes.”

The man in 14B was staring straight ahead now. He had felt me looking. His hand had come to rest, casually, over the tattoo.

I said, very quietly, “Peter Ashford.”

He didn’t turn his head. He didn’t move at all. But I saw his throat work, one small swallow, and I knew.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think you have me confused with someone else.”

The accent was still there. British, soft. Daniel had never had an accent in his life.

“Look at me,” I said.

He didn’t.

“Please look at me.”

He turned. Slowly. The gray eyes were the wrong color, Daniel’s had been brown, but the shape of them was right, and the small scar through the left eyebrow was right, and the way the mouth pulled slightly to one side when he was trying not to show anything was so unbearably right that I put my hand over my mouth and made a sound that wasn’t quite a word.

“Ma’am,” he said, in the British accent, “are you all right? Should I call someone?”

“Stop it,” I whispered. “Stop it.”

He held my gaze. And for one second, one full second, the accent dropped and it was Daniel’s voice, my Daniel, saying, “Claire. Please. Not here.”

Then it was gone. He turned back to his book. His hand was shaking.

I sat there and I thought: I am going to be sick. I am going to be sick right here in seat 14A on a Delta flight to Portland, and then I am going to stand up and I am going to walk to the front of the plane and I am going to tell them my dead husband is sitting next to me.

I did none of those things.

I closed my eyes. I put my head against the cold plastic of the window. And I made a decision, the way you make decisions in dreams, without thinking, from a place that isn’t quite the surface of your mind.

I was going to get off this plane. I was going to follow him. And I was going to find out what my husband had done.

We landed. He stood before the seatbelt sign was off, pulled a small leather bag from the overhead, and did not look at me. I let him go three rows ahead in the aisle. I watched the back of his head, the exact curve where his hair met his neck, and I thought about how many times I had kissed that spot.

He walked fast through the terminal. Not running. A man with somewhere to be. I stayed twenty feet back, weaving around families and rolling luggage, my carry-on banging against my hip.

He went to the rideshare pickup. I got in line four cars behind him.

The man was tall. His car was a black sedan. He got in and I heard him say something to the driver and the car pulled away, and I said to my own driver, a woman named Denise who was chewing gum and listening to talk radio, “I need you to follow that car.”

She looked at me in the rearview.

“I’ll pay you double the fare,” I said. “Triple. Please.”

She put the car in drive.

“Honey,” she said, “this better not be some crazy thing.”

“It is,” I said. “But please.”

We followed him into the city. Down through the rain-slicked streets, past the river, into a quieter neighborhood where the houses had porches and Halloween decorations still up in November. His car stopped in front of a small yellow bungalow with a red door.

He got out. He looked at his phone. And then, and I will remember this until I die, a little girl came running out of the house. Maybe four years old. Blonde. She was wearing footie pajamas with dinosaurs on them.

She yelled, “Daddy!”

And he caught her.

Denise looked at me in the mirror. Very quietly, she said, “Oh, honey.”

He lifted the little girl and swung her up onto his hip and kissed her forehead. A woman came out onto the porch after her. Pretty, brown hair pulled back, a dish towel over one shoulder. She smiled at him. She said something I couldn’t hear. He laughed, and even from the car, even through the rain, I knew that laugh.

Denise pulled forward slowly, past the house, so we wouldn’t be seen. She parked around the corner.

She turned around and looked at me.

“Whatever this is,” she said, “you don’t have to do it tonight.”

I sat in the back of her car and I cried for the first time in six months.

Then I wiped my face with the sleeve of my coat, and I said, “Yes I do.”