Chapter 1

ISLA POV

The gym smelled like burnt popcorn and glue sticks, which is what an elementary school fundraiser smells like no matter which elementary school you're at, and I was elbow-deep in cupcake wrappers when Dana Whitfield leaned over the bake sale table holding her phone up like she'd found something urgent.

"Okay, don't judge me, I'm looking for my sister's banana bread recipe and I have four thousand pictures of my dog instead." She swiped through her camera roll, laughing at herself, phone tilted my way without really thinking about it. "Wait…. isn't that your husband?"

She turned the screen toward me before the question fully landed. An airport photo, clearly an accident, background noise from a trip she'd taken last week,travelers near a gate, rolling suitcases, the general mess of an airport lounge. And just behind her own shoulder in the frame, a man in a gray suit laughing at something, a woman's hand resting on his forearm.

He had Julian's jaw. Julian's exact haircut. Julian's watch, the one I bought him for our anniversary three years ago, catching the light.

"Huh," Dana said, already scrolling past it, hunting for banana bread. "Weird, right? Looks just like him. Where's Julian this week?"

"Denver," I said. My voice came out normal. I genuinely don't know how.

"Small world. Anyway, here it is…" She held up a photo of an actual recipe card, delighted, already done with the conversation entirely.

I smiled and said something about the cupcakes needing more frosting, and I couldn't tell you a single other thing that happened at that fundraiser. I signed up for something. I'm fairly sure I agreed to run a face-painting booth in October. I said goodbye to six different people whose names I could not have repeated back to you at gunpoint.

I called Julian from the parking lot before I'd even shut the car door.

He picked up on the second ring, video, tie loosened, a room service tray behind him with one of those little metal domes still covering something. "Hey, you. Is everything okay? You look.."

"Where are you right now?"

"Denver. Same as I told you this morning." He tilted the phone, showing me a window, some skyline I didn't know well enough to argue with. "Why, what's going on?"

"Dana Whitfield showed me a photo from her flight last week. Some guy in the background who looked exactly like you. Same suit. Same watch."

He didn't even blink, which is the part I kept coming back to later,how fast the answer came, like he rehearsed it for a version of this exact question. "That's probably O'Hare. I had a two-hour layover Tuesday, on the way to Denver. Half of corporate America flies through O'Hare on a Tuesday, Isla."

"There was a woman's hand on his arm."

"Was there." Flat, almost bored, and he rubbed a hand over his jaw. "Probably someone laughing at a joke and grabbing my arm. I talked to nine people I didn't know that day. You want me to ask Marcus who was standing near me at the gate?"

"No." Put out loud like that, it did sound ridiculous. A blurry stranger's background photo. A watch plenty of men could own. "No, forget it."

"You're not being crazy, you just miss me." That easy smile, the one that used to make my stomach do something ridiculous back when we were dating. "I miss you too. How was the fundraiser?"

We talked a few more minutes,the face-painting booth I apparently signed up for, whether he'd be home Thursday or Friday, some story about Marcus losing a shoe sprinting for a gate and by the time we hung up, the cold, tight thing in my chest had mostly let go.

There was a version of me, a long time ago, who would've called that design firm herself and asked point-blank where a detail like that came from, because that version of me used to know everyone in the industry and wasn't scared of sounding nosy. I hadn't been her in years. I told myself the trade had been worth it.

Julian came home a day early. I heard the garage door around eleven, and by the time I got downstairs he already had his jacket half off and that look on his face, and he kissed me like he'd been thinking about it the whole flight. It had been weeks since he looked at me that way. Lying there afterward with his arm heavy across me in the dark, I told myself this was the real answer, better than anything he could've said on a phone screen. A man who flies home early to hold his wife isn't hiding anything.

His phone buzzed on the nightstand a little after midnight. He reached over half-asleep, glanced at it, and turned it face-down without a word.

I didn't ask who it was.

My own phone lit up a minute later. Nora, of course, even at that hour. ‘Please tell me you didn't actually agree to a face-painting booth.’

‘I have no memory of the last hour of that fundraiser,’ I typed back. ‘So possibly.’

‘Legend. Also, random… Are you good? You've got that voice-note energy tonight.’

I looked at Julian's phone, screen-down on the nightstand, dark and silent and somehow louder than if it had kept buzzing.

‘I'm fine,’ I typed. ‘Just tired.’

I lay there a long time after that, listening to him breathe, wondering why a face-down phone bothered me more than a stranger's blurry photo ever had.