The Man Who Sat Next to Me on the Red-Eye Was Wearing My Dead Husband’s Watch

Part 1

The man who sat next to me on the red-eye from Portland to Newark was wearing my dead husband’s watch.

I noticed it when he reached up to close the overhead bin. A scratched steel Omega Seamaster, 1998 model, with a hairline crack across the six o’clock marker where Daniel had dropped it on our kitchen tile the summer we bought the house.

I know that watch the way you know your own hands.

Daniel had been dead for fourteen months. Car accident on I-84, black ice, single vehicle. Closed casket. His personal effects came home in a plastic hospital bag, and the watch was not in it. The medical examiner said it must have been ejected. I filed a claim. I moved on. I told myself moving on was a decision I made every morning.

Now here it was on the wrist of a stranger, three inches from my elbow, at thirty-five thousand feet.

He caught me staring.

“Family piece,” he said, and smiled the polite half-smile you give a woman who has clearly not slept.

I said, “It’s beautiful.”

I said it in the calm voice I use with clients when the numbers are wrong and I don’t want them to know yet.

He was maybe forty. Sandy hair going gray at the temples, wedding ring, khakis, the soft face of a man who worked in an office and did not lift heavy things. He introduced himself as Ethan. He was flying home to Newark after visiting his brother in Portland.

I told him my name was Claire, which is true, and that I was going to see my sister, which is not.

I was going to Newark because a woman named Marisol Vega had emailed me two weeks ago and said, *I think you should know some things about your husband. I would rather tell you in person. I understand if you never write back.*

I had written back.

The watch on Ethan’s wrist ticked in the pressurized cabin air. I watched the second hand sweep past the crack at six o’clock, and I thought about the last time I had seen it, on Daniel’s arm as he backed out of our driveway on a Thursday morning in October, waving at me through the windshield with two fingers, the way he always did.

“Where’d you get it?” I asked. My mouth was dry. “The watch.”

“My father-in-law gave it to me,” Ethan said. “Anniversary gift, from him and my wife. He passed last year. It meant a lot.”

I nodded slowly.

“Your wife’s father,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“What was his name?”

Ethan looked at me. Not suspicious yet, just curious about why the tired woman in 14B was asking questions about his wife’s dead father at two in the morning.

“Daniel,” he said. “Daniel Whitaker.”

The plane kept flying. The reading light above my seat kept glowing. Somewhere behind me a baby started crying and a mother started shushing and a man coughed into his elbow, and I sat very still in my seat with my hands flat on my thighs because if I moved I was going to be sick.

Daniel Whitaker was my husband.

Daniel Whitaker was not anyone’s father-in-law. We had tried for eight years. We had done three rounds of IVF. We had cried in a Panera parking lot after the last one because we could not afford a fourth and could not bring ourselves to say it out loud.

Daniel Whitaker had died fourteen months ago and been cremated at Riverside Memorial in Portland, Oregon.

I opened my mouth to say something, I don’t know what, and Ethan smiled at me again, the friendly stranger smile, and said, “You okay? You look a little pale. First time flying?”

“No,” I said. “I fly all the time.”

I turned my face toward the window. Below us there was nothing, no city, no lights, only the black shape of the country I had lived in my whole life without knowing it.

Marisol Vega’s email was folded in the front pocket of my bag. I had read it seventeen times. She had signed it, *I am so sorry to be the one. He was not who you thought he was, and I am not sure I was either.*

I had assumed she was his mistress.

I sat next to her son-in-law for four more hours and did not say another word.

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