Chapter 2 - The Face I Had Buried
When the wheels hit the runway, I didn't move for the aisle like everybody else. I stayed put. Owen pressed close against my arm.
Up ahead, the man stood and pulled a carry-on down from the bin.
He was leaner than Adrian had been. More gray at the temples. The beard changed the line of his jaw. For half a heartbeat I let myself hope I was just a grieving woman turning a stranger into a ghost.
Then he turned toward the exit, and the overhead light dropped straight across his face.
It was him.
Not a look-alike. Not a trick my grief was playing. Adrian. My husband. The man I'd spent almost three years believing would never stand in another airport, never get older, never hold his son again.
Owen's fingers tightened around mine.
"Mom?"
I couldn't make my mouth work.
Adrian walked up the jet bridge with the blonde woman beside him. His hand settled on her lower back for a second as they melted into the crowd at the gate.
He never once looked back.
I followed. Not close. Just close enough.
At baggage claim I watched them lift two matching suitcases off the belt and roll them toward the rental counters. The woman said something to him over her shoulder.
Not Adrian.
"Marcus, can you grab mine too?"
He turned right away. Automatic. Like he'd been answering to it for years.
Marcus.
My husband had a whole other name.
That night, after Owen finally fell asleep in our Savannah hotel room, I sat by the window and stared at the lights along the river.
For three years I had grieved a man who had apparently just been living somewhere else the whole time.
I thought about all of it. Owen crying before school the morning of the father-son breakfast. The first Christmas, when he snuck a wrapped present under the tree with "DAD" written on the tag in crayon. The stack of bills I found in Adrian's desk drawer that I didn't understand for months. The nights I lay awake wondering if he'd been scared at the end. If it had been quick.
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Every time somebody hinted that maybe he'd walked away on purpose, I had defended him.
Now I sat there in the dark trying to decide which one hurt worse — losing him, or finding out I might never have known him at all.
