Before You

It was a gaze I wouldn’t forget.

One I felt all the way in my toes.

I replied, “You too,” but he didn’t hear me.

He was already gone.

TWENTY-SIX

JARED

I SWIPED my thumb toward the top of my phone, and as a new picture appeared, I studied it before moving to the next. There were thousands of shots. Some of food, some of her life. Some of just Billie.

Painfully beautiful in each one.

She posted every day, alternating what she was highlighting but always staying in the food theme. Her brand was consistent, and it had been for years.

Except for the last four days since the crash where she hadn’t posted at all.

I lifted the small tumbler off the bed and brought it up to my lips, swallowing the peppery liquor. As I rewound the years, going further back in her photos, she’d switched up hairstyles and her glasses—when she had them on. The thing I noticed the most was her maturity. I saw it in her eyes.

If I saw them right now, I’d guarantee they looked haunted.

But I hadn’t seen her since I left her at the hospital.

I just knew …

Because mine looked the same fucking way.

I took another drink and set it back on the bed, the pads of my fingers soggy from the wet glass. And I stared at the last picture of herself that she had shared. The date was two days before our flight to San Francisco. The location was Tribeca, a few blocks from where I lived, at a coffee shop I went to often. She was holding her drink under her chin, but the focus was Billie’s profile. The angle of the shot started at the base of her neck and moved across her face, the sunlight from Church Street reflecting off her skin.

That was what happiness looked like.

Peacefulness. Contentment.

It sure as hell didn’t look like this—a head filled with so many goddamn thoughts that it was enough to keep me awake. I watched the morning light come into my room, and my day began. The last three had been filled with meetings. I’d retold the story to the police and FBI, Homeland Security and the FAA. I’d answered their hundreds of questions.

We all had.

Yesterday was the last of it, and now, we were supposed to follow up with our doctors and therapists and everyone else we needed to help us return to normal.

I brought the glass up to my mouth and swallowed until only drips from the ice were going down my throat before putting it on the nightstand. I then grabbed my pillow and fisted the down.

Normal.

Those days were gone.

Long, long gone.

TWENTY-SEVEN

BILLIE

I STOOD in front of the window in my living room, my forehead and palms pressed to the glass. I didn’t know how long I’d been here. I wasn’t looking at anything in particular, just the blur of movement on the street below.

Cars. People. Bikes.

And here I was, in my apartment, perfectly still, focused on everything that had happened in the sky and the aftermath of what it looked like on the land.

The field in Pennsylvania we’d crashed in. The private vehicles that had driven us and our families back to New York.

The one hundred and sixteen total people on board the plane.

The eight fatalities.

The eighty of us who had been injured.

I didn’t see it like a movie where I could stop and start anyplace I wanted. It didn’t run in a continuous loop either. What I saw were flashes that lasted only seconds. These tiny windows came in random order and took place sometime during the forty-two minutes we had been airborne.

Some were from before the drone had hit our engine.

Most were from after.

But each one came hard, fast, and my brain liked to serve them up every hour or so like they were cocktails.

Days ago, it’d happened several times a minute. According to my doctor, this was improvement.

What hadn’t returned were my taste buds. Nothing had technically happened to them; the crash hadn’t injured my tongue. I just had no desire to eat.

And I didn’t understand it.

Food had been comfort my entire life. It was my family’s way of showing love. We ate together, and we fed whoever came over. When we weren’t eating, we were talking about what we were going to have.

Food would make this better.

I had to believe that.

It would make it all seem a little more tolerable.

I grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair, and without even putting a bra on, I went out in the night.