My husband rang to say he was in emergency surgery all night. I was looking down through the glass walkway at him at the time, with his arm round another woman and his entire family beside him holding boarding passes. I didn’t go down. I went to a quiet corner and made one phone call.

PART 1 — OPEN THE FILE

“Hey, sweetheart. I’m stuck in an emergency. Looks like I’m here till morning.”

Warm, easy, slightly tired. He is extremely good at that voice; he has used it on frightened families for fifteen years.

I opened my mouth to tell him to be careful.

And then I looked down through the glass.

Twenty feet below me, in the charcoal sport coat I bought him for our eighth anniversary, my husband was walking toward a check-in desk with his arm round a blonde woman and a matching case rolling beside hers.

I said, “No,” out loud, to nobody.

Then I saw the rest.

Rosa. Bexley. Bexley’s two children.

Every one of them with a boarding pass in their hand, laughing, in that loose happy formation a family makes when the holiday has started at the airport.

All of them except me.

“Love you,” Whit said, and hung up.

And two seconds later he leaned in and kissed her, in front of his mother, in front of his sister, in front of a nine-year-old and a six-year-old.

Nobody reacted.

Rosa adjusted her sunglasses. Bexley laughed and took a photograph. The children looked at the camera the way children look at a camera when nothing unusual is happening.