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Patrick goes through the crew entrance. I go through departures. We split at the same point we split at on Tuesday, the terminal dividing, the practicality of his job requiring it, and this time the goodbye is different because this time we are going to the same place and there is nothing to miss, only the Atlantic and the locked flight-deck door between us.

He kisses me anyway. Thoroughly. In the Cape Town departures hall with his crew bag over his shoulder and the terminal moving around us.

"I'll see you on the other side," he says.

"You'll see me in eleven hours," I say. "You'll be working."

"Semantics." He kisses me again, briefly. "Seat 1A."

"I know where my seat is."

He grins. Goes through the door. I watch him until he's gone, the uniform, the easy authority, the door closing behind him, and then I go to find my gate.

1A. The lounge first. Coffee and my book.

The aircraft pushes back at exactly twenty-hundred.

I check my phone again.

Sometime between the hotel and the runway, curiosity became certainty. The photograph has been reposted. There are hundreds of comments now. Someone has found my name.

I put the phone in my pocket.

Patrick is behind the locked flight-deck door, bringing us home. He doesn't know yet. I will tell him when we land, not before. There is nothing he can do at forty thousand feet except sit with it, and I am not willing to give him that.

I open my book and read the same sentence three times.

Outside, the wing light blinks its steady red pulse against the black. Somewhere ahead: Amsterdam, the canal, the apartment, and the ordinary life we have been building without deciding to.

Patrick is bringing me there. The man I have apparently, irrevocably, without adequate preparation or prior planning, fallen completely in love with.

I have never been particularly good at waiting.

For him, I can.

CHAPTER SIX

PATRICK

Schiphol. 07:43. The shutdown sequence takes eleven minutes. I know this the way I know most things about this aircraft, not from counting but from the body. Eleven minutes of checklist and handover and the administrative close-out after bringing three hundred and forty people safely across the Atlantic, and then I am through the crew door and into the terminal and Jan is on the other side.

He is at the arrivals barrier. Carry-on beside him, hands in his pockets, watching for me with the attention he brings to things he has decided matter. When he sees me something moves in his face — the thing that is not quite a smile — and I cross the terminal toward him and think about Cape Town and Table Mountain and just because and feel the accumulated weight of the last four days settle into something I want to carry.

I reach him.

I am about to say something, something about the flight or the morning or the fact that I have been thinking about him for eleven hours, when he takes out his phone.

He holds it out. His face is very still.

I look at the screen.

The stranger's photograph. My Instagram.

The comments beneath both.

I posted five photos over four days — the mountain from the waterfront, the cable car view, the hotel terrace in the morning, the Camps Bay beach, one of the harbour at night. Standard. I post from layovers. I have always posted from layovers.

Jan is visible in two of them. A shoulder in the terrace shot. His hand on the table at the waterfront, half his profile turned toward the water.