“Business?”
“Full.”
“First?”
She hesitates. “There is one first-class seat available.”
“How much?”
She tells me.
The number is absurd. Cruel. More than what is available on the card Mama gave me for emergencies, because in our family emergencies apparently do not include being abandoned and trapped in an airport.
I open my banking app anyway. My fingers are clumsy. The screen blurs.
Not now. Not here. Not in front of strangers.
“Can you hold it?” I ask, and my voice cracks on the last word.
The woman softens. “Only for a few minutes.”
I nod like that helps. Like I have a plan.
I lower my head, one hand pressed to the counter, and for one terrible second, I almost break. Not elegantly. Not quietly. I feel it coming up my throat, the sob, the whole ugly collapse.
Then a voice speaks behind me.
Deep. Calm.
“Here.”
A black card appears on the counter beside my hand.
“Take my card.”
I go still.
The woman behind the counter looks past me, and her entire posture changes.
I turn.
The man standing behind me is older than Lev. Much older. Late thirties, maybe early forties. Tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in a dark overcoat that looks softer than sin and more expensive than my pride. Silver threads cut through his dark hair at the temples. His beard is trimmed close, also touched with gray.
But it’s his eyes that hold me.
Stormy. They aren’t quite blue or gray. Something colder, deeper, like weather over steel.
He looks at me as if he has already understood too much.
“I can’t take your card,” I say.
“You can.”
“I don’t know you.”
“No,” he says. “You don’t.”
His gaze moves briefly to my bare left hand, then to my face. Not an ounce of pity in his expression. Thank God.
