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

Part 4: What I Kept

He called me eleven days later.

I was in the hotel room I’d booked for two nights and stayed in for two weeks, sitting on the bed in a t-shirt eating pad thai out of the container, and my phone rang from a number I didn’t recognize, and I answered because I had been answering every call.

“I told her,” he said.

I set the container down on the nightstand.

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

“What did she do.”

There was a long pause. I could hear a kettle whistling somewhere in the background, and then it cut off, and then he said, “She hasn’t decided yet.”

“Where are you.”

“A motel by the airport. She asked me to leave the house. She, she needs time with Lily. To figure out what to say. Lily keeps asking where I am. Sarah is telling her Daddy had to go on another trip.”

I closed my eyes.

“Are you going to turn yourself in,” I said.

“For what.”

“I don’t know. Fraud. Identity theft. Something.”

“There’s nothing to charge me with, Claire. Peter’s family thinks he drowned. Nobody’s looking for anyone. I didn’t take his money. I didn’t take his identity, I made up a new one. Peter Ashford is dead and Edward Halloran is dead and the only thing left is a man named Peter Nash who has a wife and a daughter and a very small landscaping business and forty-two hundred dollars in savings.”

“You have to tell them. His family.”

“I know.”

“His sister has spent two and a half years thinking her brother is at the bottom of the ocean.”

“I know.”

“So has your mother.”

Silence.

“Claire.”

“What.”

“When you called me by my name at the kitchen table. Edward. It was the first time I’d heard it in almost three years.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know what to do with that.”

I looked out the window of the hotel room. It was raining again, or still. A woman in a yellow coat was crossing the street with a dog.

“I’m going home tomorrow,” I said. “You have my number. When you’ve told his family, call me. I’ll know because his sister will call me first. She’ll be furious. She’ll want to know why I didn’t tell her the second I knew.”

“What are you going to say.”

“I’m going to say I gave you the chance to be the one who told her. Because that was the only decent thing left for you to do.”

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, “Do you want to see me again.”

I didn’t answer right away. I thought about it, actually thought about it, the way you think about whether to take a job or move to a city.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to be honest with you, Edward. If I had found out on that plane that you’d been in a coma, or had amnesia, or had been kidnapped, I would have walked through fire to get you home. I would have quit my job and moved to Portland and spent the rest of my life reminding you who you were. That’s how much I loved you.”

“I know.”

“But you weren’t lost. You left. And you made a whole other life, and there is a little girl in that life who calls you Daddy, and she didn’t ask for any of this, and neither did Sarah, and neither did I.”

“I know.”

“So the kindest thing I can do for all of us is go home.”

“Okay, Claire.”

“Take care of your daughter.”

I hung up.

I flew home the next morning. Marcus, the kind man from the three dates, picked me up from the airport because I had asked him to before I’d left, before any of this, back when I was just a widow taking a work trip to Portland. He hugged me at the curb and said, “You look tired,” and I said, “I am,” and he drove me home without asking anything else, and I understood in that moment that this was what I had been flinching from. Not his hand. The idea that I would ever have to feel this much again for anyone.

I didn’t tell him. I haven’t told him. I’m not sure I ever will.

Peter Ashford’s sister called me nine days later. Her name is Rachel. She was not furious the way I’d predicted. She was quieter than that. She said, “Claire, I have to tell you something and I need you to sit down,” and I sat down on my kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and I let her tell me the story I already knew, and I made the sounds a person makes when they are hearing something for the first time, and when she was done I said, “Rachel, I’m so sorry,” and I meant it, because I was sorry for her, and because a small ugly part of me was relieved that he had, at least, done the one thing I’d asked.

She said, “The police want to talk to him. They’re not sure what to charge him with. There might not be anything. But they want to talk to him.”

I said, “I know.”

She said, “Did you know him, Claire? When you were married. Did you know he was the kind of person who could do this.”

I sat on the kitchen floor and I thought about it for a long time.

“No,” I finally said. “I don’t think I did.”

But I’m not sure that was true.

Because there had been a night, maybe eight months before the kayak, when I’d come home from work early and found him sitting in the dark in our kitchen. Just sitting. No lights on. No music. And when I’d asked him what was wrong he’d said, “I was thinking about how I could just leave. Not you. Everything. Just get up and drive and never come back. Isn’t that a strange thing to think about.”

And I’d laughed, because I thought he was joking, and I’d turned on the light, and I’d started making dinner, and I’d never asked him about it again.

I kept the watch.

He mailed it to me a month after Rachel’s call, in a small padded envelope with no return address. There was a note. It said, You should have it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of it.

I put it in the drawer of my nightstand. I don’t wear it. I don’t look at it often. But sometimes at night I open the drawer and I run my thumb over the hairline scratch at the four o’clock marker, and I think about the man who put that scratch there, the man who slipped with a claw hammer on a Saturday afternoon in June and swore so loud the neighbor’s dog barked.

I loved that man. He was real. He existed. He is gone now, in the way that mattered, and he has been gone longer than I understood.

The other man, the one in seat 14B, the one with the accent and the daughter and the small landscaping business, I don’t know what happened to him. Rachel keeps me updated when there’s something to update. Sarah filed for divorce. Lily is in kindergarten now. He works. He pays child support. He calls his mother once a week, which is more than he ever did when he was Daniel.

He has never called me again.

Sometimes I think about the moment on the plane when I could have said nothing. When I could have looked at the watch and told myself I was imagining things, and closed my eyes, and landed in Portland and gone to my conference and flown home and lived out the rest of my life as a widow.

I would have been happier, maybe. Certainly quieter.

But I would have been living inside a lie somebody else built for me. And I have decided, in the two years since, that I would rather have the truth, even this truth, than the peace of not knowing.

Marcus asked me to marry him last spring. I said not yet. He is a patient man. He is waiting.

I keep the watch in the drawer.

Some nights I take it out and I hold it in my palm until the metal warms, and I say, out loud, to nobody, “I know who you were. I know who you were. I know who you were.”

And then I put it back, and I close the drawer, and I turn out the light, and I sleep.