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

Part 3: The Kitchen Table

I knocked on the red door.

The woman answered. Up close she was younger than I’d thought, maybe thirty-five, freckles across her nose, a wooden spoon in her hand.

“Can I help you?”

“I need to speak to your husband.”

She blinked. “Um. He just got in from a trip. Can I ask what this is about?”

Behind her, from somewhere in the house, I heard him. The British accent, saying something to the little girl about washing hands before dinner.

I said, “Tell him Claire Halloran is at the door.”

The color left her face slowly, from the top down. Her mouth opened. She stepped back into the house without closing the door, and I heard her voice, low and urgent, and then his voice, and then a long silence.

He came to the door.

The accent was gone. He looked at me the way a man looks at the thing he has been running from for two and a half years, and he said, “Come in, Claire.”

I came in.

The little girl was in the kitchen coloring at the table. He said to the woman, “Sarah, can you take Lily upstairs for a bit.”

Sarah looked at me. Sarah looked at him. Sarah picked up the little girl without a word and carried her past me, and the little girl waved at me over her shoulder, and I waved back because I did not know what else to do.

We sat at the kitchen table. His kitchen table. In his house. With his wife’s dish towel folded on the counter and his daughter’s crayons scattered across the wood.

I said, “You’re not Peter Ashford.”

“No.”

“Peter Ashford is dead.”

“Yes.”

“You killed him.”

He flinched. “No. God, Claire, no. The storm was real. The wave was real. He, he didn’t make it out. I did. And when I got to shore I was, I don’t know how to explain what I was.”

“Try.”

He put his hands flat on the table. The watch caught the kitchen light.

“I was standing on a beach two miles from where we launched,” he said. “I was alive and he wasn’t. I had his wallet in my pocket because we’d left them in a dry bag in my boat and his boat was the one that flipped. I had his phone. I had his ID. And I stood there and I thought, I could just walk away. I could just walk away from all of it.”

“From me.”

He didn’t answer.

“From me, Edward. Say it.”

“From you. From the mortgage. From the fights about the baby we couldn’t have. From your mother who hated me. From my job I hated. From the version of me I couldn’t stand anymore.” He was crying now, quiet, not moving to wipe his face. “I walked up to a diner and I ordered coffee and I sat there for four hours and nobody came for me. And I thought, they think I’m dead. And I let them.”

“You let them.”

“I let them.”

“You let me.”

He put his face in his hands.

I sat across from him at his kitchen table and I looked at the wall behind him, where there was a corkboard with a preschool schedule pinned to it, and a photo of the three of them at a pumpkin patch, and a save-the-date for someone’s wedding in June.

“Who is she,” I said.

“Sarah.”

“How did you meet her.”

“In Portland. About a year after. I told her my name was Peter.”

“Does she know.”

“No.”

“Does anyone know.”

“No.”

“The accent.”

“I lived in London for a summer in college. It, it started as something I did on the phone when I was job hunting, so nobody would recognize my voice if it got back. And then I couldn’t stop. And then she loved it. And then it was just, it was just who I was.”

“You have a daughter.”

“Yes.”

“How old.”

“She’ll be four in January.”

I did the math in my head. He had a child three months after my husband died. Which meant he had met Sarah, and slept with Sarah, within a year of the kayak.

I said, “I want to hate you.”

He looked up.

“I want to hate you,” I said, “and I can’t figure out how yet, because the man I’m looking at isn’t the man I was married to. That man is dead. You killed him too, you just didn’t drown him.”

He was very still.

“The watch,” I said. “Why are you still wearing the watch.”

He looked down at it. He turned it slightly on his wrist, that same unconscious motion, and he said, “Because it was the only thing I couldn’t throw away. I tried. Three times. I threw it in the Willamette once and dove in after it. I told Sarah I’d dropped my keys.”

“Why.”

“Because it was the only thing left that knew who I was.”

Upstairs, I heard the little girl laugh. A high, bright sound, muffled through the ceiling. He looked up at the sound like it hurt him.

I said, “Sarah is going to come down those stairs eventually.”

“I know.”

“What are you going to tell her.”

He didn’t answer.

I stood up. My legs felt strange, like they belonged to someone else, but they held me. I picked up my purse from the back of the chair.

At the door I stopped and turned around.

“I need you to know something,” I said. “For two and a half years I have been trying to figure out how to be a widow. I have been to therapy. I have sold our house. I have given away your clothes to a shelter on Divisadero. I have learned to sleep in the middle of the bed. I have gone on three dates with a very kind man named Marcus who does not know that every time he touches my hand I flinch because it’s the wrong hand.”

He was crying again.

“And you have been here,” I said. “Making pancakes. Reading bedtime stories. Being called Daddy.”

“Claire.”

“I am not going to tell her,” I said. “That is not my job. That is your job, and you are going to do it, or you are going to spend the rest of your life waiting for the day I change my mind.”

I opened the door.

“I’ll give you two weeks,” I said. “After that, I call the police, and I call Peter Ashford’s sister, and I let her decide what happens next.”

I walked out into the rain.

Denise was still parked around the corner. She had waited. I got in the back seat and she looked at me in the mirror and she didn’t ask.

“Downtown,” I said. “Any hotel.”

She drove.