Diana moved for the second time in twenty minutes.
The first seat had been unbearable because of the couple directly in her line of sight - they'd been kissing with the focused, unself-conscious dedication of people who genuinely believed the terminal was empty except for them. The second seat had been worse. A man three rows over had dropped to one knee and produced a ring box the size of a small fist, and the woman had covered her mouth with both hands and burst into the specific, high-pitched tears of someone who'd wanted this and hadn't known it was coming, and a crowd of complete strangers had materialized around them instantly, filming on phones, as if catching someone else's joy on video might allow some of it to transfer.
Diana had watched exactly four seconds of this before picking up her carry-on and walking to the far end of Terminal 4.
Now she sat with her back to all of it and pulled out her phone. 9:47 a.m. Ethan Cole's connecting flight from Chicago had been delayed forty minutes, which meant she had at least an hour before they boarded together for the Los Angeles leg. One full hour in an airport on a bright morning in early May, surrounded by couples and proposal audiences and the specific sticky-sweet energy that descended on JFK every spring like a mood shift nobody had asked for.
She pulled up her email. Six unread messages, all from Ethan, all sent between five and six-thirty in the morning. A revised version of the Caldwell Group deck she'd spent Tuesday afternoon formatting. A reminder about the car service from LAX, which she had confirmed twice. A note asking whether she'd pre-ordered flowers for his mother's birthday next week - she had, white peonies, card signed in his name, because she did that too.
She was very good at her job.
She loved her job. She did. It was organized and clear and reliable, and it required of her exactly the thing she was best at: anticipating what someone else needed before they knew they needed it. Smoothing the friction out of Ethan's days until they ran without interruption. Being indispensable.
The word landed differently this time than it usually did. She looked at it for a moment. Indispensable. It was a good word. A strong word. It described someone essential.
It just didn't, she thought - and this was the thought she usually caught partway through and rerouted - describe someone who mattered for her own sake.
She let the thought finish for the first time in a while. She sat with it. Then she stood up.
There was a gift shop two gates over - she'd clocked it coming through security, an old habit from years of executive travel: locate the nearest bookstore, pharmacy, coffee point, identify the quietest corner, know where you can go when the terminal becomes too much. She would go there and buy something she didn't need and stand at the postcard rack until Ethan texted that he'd landed, and that would be sufficient.
She shouldered her bag and went.
The shop was warm. Retail-warm, the specific temperature of a space designed to slow you down and make you want to stay and spend money. She felt the tight line across her shoulders loosen slightly as she stepped inside and the ambient noise of the terminal softened around her.
The postcard rack was near the window. She gravitated toward it on autopilot - the slow-spinning kind, always the same eight landmarks in rotation. Statue of Liberty. Brooklyn Bridge. Empire State Building at dusk. Times Square seen from above, which required a vantage point no tourist ever had. Central Park in autumn. The Chrysler Building, which she had always preferred to the Empire State Building for reasons she'd never been able to fully articulate.
She turned the rack slowly, not really seeing any of it.
She was thinking about Patrick.
She almost always ended up thinking about Patrick when there was nothing specific requiring her attention. It was a reflex she'd had for fifteen years and had not yet found a way to fully break. Patrick Holloway - her mother's closest friend, her mother's most consistent Sunday guest, the man who had appeared in Diana's life when she was twelve years old as a warm and slightly magnetic presence who was genuinely kind to her in the way that interesting adults are kind to children they actually notice. Not in the performative way, not condescending. He had just - paid attention. When she talked, he listened. He'd told her she was sharp, more than once, with the easy confidence of a man who had spent two decades in litigation and knew how to read intelligence in a face.
She had been twelve. She had loved him immediately, the way twelve-year-olds love: completely and wordlessly and with total sincerity and absolutely no idea what to do with it.
By sixteen she'd understood what the feeling was.
By eighteen she'd understood it was not going to go anywhere.
By twenty-five she'd understood it was not going to go anywhere and she still wasn't over it, which was its own category of problem.
By thirty-one she'd stopped calling it love and started calling it a habit, because habit was something you could work on. Something manageable. Something that could, theoretically, be replaced.
Patrick had taught her to cook. That was the particular irony she lived with. He'd started when she was sixteen - not with any romantic intention, just because he genuinely loved to cook and she'd been there and willing, and he was generous with the things he loved. She had learned everything he showed her with the concentrated desperation of a teenager trying to generate reasons to be near the person they loved. She had become an excellent cook. She had also become, in the process, the kind of woman who learned things in service of someone else's pleasure rather than her own, and she was still, fifteen years later, working on unlearning that pattern.
