“The bags can sit.”
Lauren looked at the terminal as if it might still save her by simply existing, by being a system you could obey. Then she nodded once, the nod she gave when she had lost a point and meant to win the next one somewhere quieter. She took Mason’s hand. He let her, but he looked back at Derek to make sure the hand was not a decision about the plane. Derek tried to put that reassurance in his face and did not know if he managed it.
They went through the doors into the bright, recycled air. The paper stayed in Derek’s jacket pocket, the navy cloth warm over it. He did not take it out at the escalator. He did not take it out while Lauren walked too fast and Mason trotted to keep up, the blue backpack knocking against his spine. He took it out only when they had turned a corner past a coffee kiosk and found a run of seats facing a window that looked at nothing but tailfins and gray sky. No logos he bothered to read. No cities on the screens that he let himself look at yet.
He sat. He opened the fold.
The print was ordinary. Confirmation numbers. A departure in under an hour. Passenger one, Lauren Hale. Passenger two, Mason Hale. Passenger three, a name he had never heard in his house, not at dinner, not in a story about her family, not once in twelve years: Jonah Brennan. Outbound, three. Return, two days later, Lauren Hale and Mason Hale. The third seat went out and did not come back.
He read it again because the eye will do that when the mind refuses the first delivery. Jonah Brennan. Brennan was her name before him. Her father was Howard. Her sister was Claire. Her mother, Ruth, had died the winter before last. There was no Jonah in any of the Christmas cards Claire still sent, no Jonah in the photographs on the bookcase, no Jonah in the careful, limited way Lauren spoke about Wilmington when she spoke about it at all.
Derek put the paper on his knee. His hands were steady. That steadiness frightened him more than shaking would have.