Page 302 of The Lies We Play

Now . . .

The pilot announces that we’re about to descend in twenty minutes.

I look out the window.

There is no city below me. No skyline. No dramatic glitter of Manhattan announcing itself like a promise I’m not sure I’m allowed to believe in. There is only a strip of dark with edge lights along it, a few buildings the size of warehouses, and a stretch of nothing where Long Island has agreed to keep its mouth shut about who lands here.

Bella is awake against the seat belt strap at my left wrist.

She has been awake since we cleared Italian airspace. She tremored through the Atlantic the way she does when emotion becomes too large for my body to contain, and then, about an hour ago, she went still.

The stillness has been worse than the tremor.

I have not been with Creed Lafontaine in ten years. I don’t know what to expect.

The plane drops, slow and clean. Finnegan brings it in like he has done this on a strip of dark a hundred times, which he probably has. The wheels touch so smoothly my body realizes we have landed before my mind does. The cabin shifts. The engines change to the lower tone, which means motion has ended and whatever comes next no longer belongs to the sky.

“Welcome home, Ms. Crane,” Finnegan says through the cabin speaker.

He says it like a man who knows exactly what the word home will do to me and is giving me one private second to feel it before I have to walk into it.

I press the heel of my hand to one eye, then the other, and breathe through my nose until the cabin stops tilting inside me. Bella tremors once at my wrist—a small, here-we-go tremor—and then settles.

The cabin door opens.

The night comes in cold and damp, carrying New York with it. Fuel. Asphalt. Salt grass at the edge of the field. November in the Northeast. Air that doesn't care how long I have been gone.

I unbuckle.

I stand.

The cabin steward—a woman Finnegan introduced as Lola, brisk and unsentimental—has my coat in her hands before I take a step. She helps me into it. She hands me my bag. She walks me to the door.

“Three steps down,” she says. “Watch the second one. It’s a little short.”

“Thank you.”

“Welcome back.”

I have to stop in the doorway for one second.

Creed is standing on the tarmac about ten feet from the plane, hands in the pockets of a black coat.

He is bigger than I remember.

That is the first thing.

The second is worse.

He is looking up at the doorway of the plane like he has been standing in this exact spot for ten years, waiting for a door to open and give him back the part of his life that vanished.

My vision blurs.

The tarmac lights frame him in a pale wash I don't trust myself to interpret. He is older. Of course he is. Time has touched his face the way it touches men who have survived themselves and kept going. There are lines at the corners of his eyes now. His shoulders look broader under the coat. His mouth is still the same mouth.

That is what undoes me.

The mouth.