Chapter 1 - The Man Who Had His Eyes
“My father is Thomas Morgan,” the captain said. “And he’s alive.”
The empty cabin seemed to stretch around me.
Somewhere behind the last row, a flight attendant stopped moving.
I stared at the man standing beside my seat. He was perhaps forty, with silver beginning at his temples and a small scar through one eyebrow.
But his eyes.
Thomas had looked at me with those eyes across a chipped table in the university cafeteria, pretending not to notice when I pushed the larger half of our sandwich toward him.
“No,” I whispered.
The captain crouched in the aisle.
“My name is Lucas Hale. I know this is a terrible way to tell you. I didn’t know you were on my flight until we were approaching the airport.”
I shook my head.
“No.”
He glanced at the spilled water, then at my shaking hands.
“Would you like someone here? Your family? A doctor?”
I almost laughed.
For fifty-five years, people had offered to help me survive Thomas being dead.
Now someone was asking how to help me survive the possibility that he wasn’t.
“Show me,” I said.
Lucas took out his phone.
The photograph showed an elderly man seated beside a window, wearing a blue cardigan. His hair was white. His shoulders were narrower than I remembered.
A cane leaned against his chair.
On the table beside him sat a small model airplane.
I searched the face.
Age had done what age always does. It had lengthened some features and softened others. But above his left cheek was a pale crescent scar.
Thomas had gotten it repairing a bicycle chain the summer we met.
I reached toward the screen.
The flight attendant knelt beside Lucas.
“My name is June,” she said softly. “May I bring you some fresh water?”
I nodded without looking at her.
“Why Hale?” I asked. “His name is Morgan.”
“That’s part of what I need to explain.”
“Where has he been?”
Lucas swallowed.
“He was badly injured during the war. For a long time, he couldn’t tell anyone who he was.”
“How long?”
“Long enough that the records didn’t connect the way they should have.”
I looked up sharply.
“Don’t make this neat for me.”
He went still.
Then he nodded.
“I won’t.”
Outside the window, a baggage cart rolled past in the sunlight.
It offended me that ordinary things continued happening.
“Does he know you’re here?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know I’m here?”
“Not yet.”
“Then who has been trying to find me?”
“My father, once he began remembering. Then me.”
Lucas turned his phone toward himself and opened another photograph.
This one showed a piece of yellowed paper.
Two lines were written across it.
One cup. Two spoons. Your terrible singing.
My breath caught.
Nobody knew about the spoons.
We had used them to share the last of a chocolate pudding when we couldn’t afford dessert. Thomas had sung along with the café radio, deliberately off-key, until the owner threatened to charge us for disturbing the customers.
“Where did he get that?”
“He wrote it during a memory assessment.”
I covered my mouth.
June offered me the water.
This time, I took it.
“I need to call my daughter.”
Lucas’s expression softened.
“Of course.”
My daughter, Grace, answered on the third ring.
“Mom? Did you land?”
I tried to speak.
Nothing came.
“Mom?”
“There’s a man here.”
“What man?”
“The captain.”
A pause.
“Are you all right?”
“He says Thomas is alive.”
Grace didn’t answer immediately.
My practical, careful daughter knew what that name meant. She also knew how often lonely people were targeted by strangers carrying miraculous stories.
“Put him on,” she said.
Lucas took the phone.
He introduced himself, gave her his full name, and offered to provide contact information she could independently verify. He made no request for money, signatures, secrecy, or immediate travel.
I heard Grace ask questions.
Good questions.
Questions I should have been asking.
When Lucas returned the phone, she said, “I’m coming. Don’t go anywhere alone, and don’t agree to anything because you’re afraid the chance will disappear.”
I closed my eyes.
“I taught you that.”
“Yes,” she said. “And now you get to listen.”
After we ended the call, Lucas sat across the aisle.
“How did you know my seat?”
“June mentioned a passenger who makes this trip every year. You told her you were visiting a memorial for a missing pilot.”
June looked apologetic.
“I remembered you from last spring.”
Lucas continued.
“When she said Eleanor, I asked whether your last name was Whitcomb.”
“My mother’s maiden name.”
“We’d recently found it in an old university record.”
I had resumed that surname decades earlier, after a painful break with my family.
Another explanation waiting behind the first.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“About forty minutes from here. He lives with me.”
“Is he ill?”
“He has difficult days. He’s seventy-eight.”
Seventy-eight.
I had spent so long loving a twenty-three-year-old that I had forgotten time might have been touching him too.
Lucas hesitated.
Then he said, “Before you meet him, there’s something else.”
I looked at him.
“My mother was his wife.”
May you like
The little remaining air left my chest.
“And she loved him,” Lucas added quietly. “I need you to know that before you hear the rest.”
