Chapter One
I am calm?Je suis calme
I am unbothered?Je suis indifférent
I am thriving?Je m’épanouis
Of all the many psychological tricks Layla Bailey had played on herself in preparation for this—only her second trip ever to her favorite…well, was it better to say, former favorite? onetime favorite? nostalgic, painful, heartbreaking favorite?…city in the world—typing positive affirmations into her translation app was possibly the most personally embarrassing.
Worse than the hours she’d spent not just packing, butplanningher packing, complete with careful searching online for aggressively neutral outfit ideas, the kind that she thought would make her seem quietly sophisticated, quietly committed to not pulling any awkward focus.
Worse than the Google Doc she’d labored over on late nights after long shifts, a color-coded itinerary that did little to soothe her, especially when her eyes encountered the blocks of time she’d turned bright yellow, unignorable reminders of the unavoidable.
Worse even than the breezy, dishonest text reply she’d sent off to Cara before the cabin doors closed.
I genuinely feel fine, I promise!she’d written to her closest friend, whose asks about this trip had grown increasingly concerned over the last two weeks, and whose most recent message had read,You can use me as an excuse if you want to cancel.
But this translation app trick?
This translation app trick had her feeling as though all her preparations had been in vain.
Breezy lies she’d been telling herself for weeks.
She pressed the button on the side of her phone to darken the screen, then leaned her head back.
Je m’épanouis, she could still see behind her now-closed eyes, a mocking afterglow.
A translation app probably couldn’t even be trusted with an expression like that.
But then again, Layla thought,sheprobably couldn’t be trusted with those translation app sentiments at the moment, either. After all, maybe it was impossible to feel like you were thriving when you were six hours into a transatlantic flight, in a middle seat way in the back because you waited too long to book your ticket, the people on either side of you absolutely dominating your armrests, your eyes dry and your neck cricked, your wireless headphones long since lost their charge.
Maybe this was simply a mind-over-matter moment.
And Layla liked to think she excelled at mind over matter.
She took a breath through her nose, imagined wiping thosesilly affirmations from the whiteboard in her brain. She didn’t really need affirmations, anyway. She had neutral outfits. She had that itinerary, which would actually be perfect if she swapped out the yellow for something less loud. A pale green, maybe. A beige, if such a thing was available in Google Docs.
And Cara could simply take her texts at face value.
She wouldn’t—couldn’t—understand all this, anyway. Cara had never been married, and the thing was, marriages were their own universes. Hers and Jamie’s especially, she’d always thought.
They had been a family.
This trip was aboutfamily.
The family she’d vowed was forever.
And the family she’d been doing her best to avoid for the better part of two years.
Another shaky breath, another clearing wipe across the busy whiteboard of her mind. Better not to think too much yet about family and what you owed them, about Jamie, about universes and how they ended. Those things, you needed fresh air for. Available armrests, at the very least. The flight was nearly over, and for the next ninety minutes or so, all Layla needed to do was keep her mind as clear as she could. Keep her hands off that app.
Except then the announcement came.
It was muffled at first, a crackle in the plane’s speaker. French to start, like all the announcements had been throughout the flight, and Layla’s fingers twitched on her phone, though she knew the flight attendant’s lightly accented English would follow. It was probably about customs procedures for landing, or another pass through the cabin to collect trash, or—
Médecin, Layla heard.
She didn’t need the app for that.
