Page 9 of Over Her Dead Body

Reid is reading. A paperback, which surprises me. Reid always said reading fiction was inefficient. He said a lot of things that turned out not to be true, but I am keeping a separate list for that and it is getting long.

He looks good. Not alive-good, not surviving-good. Good. Better than I have ever seen him look, which is a sentence I was not prepared to think and am now going to have to sit with for the next several hours.

He’s leaner, sharper. His hair is shorter, grey at the temples, and his jacket costs more than anything he owned when we were married. All this to say, he looks like a man who found the life he was supposed to be living by walking out of the one he was living with me.

I am going to need more wine.

The flight attendant comes through. I order one.

“Tough day?” she asks.

“Little bit,” I say.

She gives me a second bottle without being asked. I could kiss her.

I drink the first while looking at the seat back in front of me. I hold the second and look at Reid.

He rolls his shoulder once, the way he always did when he’d been sitting too long. Left shoulder. Always the left. He tore something in college. I used to massage it when we were watching television. I’m glad to see it still hurts.

I open the second bottle of wine. He looked at our life—at me—and chose to disappear. He is three rows ahead of me with his bad shoulder and his new jacket, and I want to walk up there and make him explain himself in front of everyone.

Here is what I am not going to do: walk up to row four and say you were dead, I buried you. I have visited your grave on bad days and some medium ones for ten years, and you are sitting here reading a paperback.

I know better than to lose my shit at thirty-seven thousand feet. I have seen what happens to people who do that on airplanes, and none of it ends with dignity.

You spend ten years imagining what it would feel like to get someone back from the dead. Relief, probably. Gratitude. A miracle.

Not this bullshit.

So I remain in my seat. I drink my wine and watch the back of his head and when this plane lands I am going to find out where he’s going and why he’s going there and who exactly I have been mourning for a decade.

Then I am going to decide what to do about it.

I remind myself Vienna is still possible if I leave Lisbon by morning. I have checked the timing six times, which is how I know the plan is bad but not yet impossible. If I stay past morning, Margot handles Bauer without me, and Celeste has something else to discuss when the partners vote.

That gives me a few hours in Lisbon.

The flight attendant comes through again. I order a water. I have almost five hours left, a body that still thinks it’s afternoon, and somewhere to be when we land, even if I don’t know what that looks like yet, and showing up unsteady is not how this is going to go.

Halfway through hour six, Reid gets up.

The aisle is narrow. He moves toward the back of the plane, one hand on the seat backs, close enough that I turn toward the window like the view at thirty-seven thousand feet has suddenly become urgent.

He passes my row.

Nothing happens.

No pause. No look. No impossible recognition cracking across his face.

Just Reid walking past me like I am a stranger, which is somehow worse than if he had seen me and looked away.

When he comes back, I keep my eyes on the window until he is seated again.

He picks up his book and puts it down a few minutes later. Tilts his head back against the seat. Doesn’t move again for an hour.

He falls asleep the way people fall asleep when they don’t have anything keeping them awake. Easy. Instant. Like a man with a clean conscience, which is a concept I am going to have to take apart piece by piece when I have the energy for it.

I watch him sleep and I think: you owe me ten years and I am going to collect every single one of them.