Page 4 of Over Her Dead Body

None of which matters if I don’t get to Vienna.

At the moment, I am speed-walking through Austin-Bergstrom with my carry-on and my hair doing something I haven't had time to address. The replacement flight I booked from the back of a car will put me in Vienna five hours behind Margot, which is not ideal but remains within the broad legal definition of salvageable. Gate 22A. Boarding now. I can still make it. I am going to make it because I am a professional, and professionals do not miss two transatlantic flights in one morning because of a Tempranillo.

I stop at the kiosk between gates because I am late, but not so late that I have become a person who boards a ten-hour flight without coffee. There are limits. I order it black, no sugar, because I am in a hurry and also because that is how I take my coffee, a fact that will matter in about ninety seconds.

That's when I see him.

He's at the other end of the kiosk. Waiting for his order. My feet stop before I mean for them to. Everything stops—the terminal noise, the gate announcements, the woman behind me reaching past me for a napkin. All of it drops away and there is just this man standing three feet from me and my heart is doing something hearts should not do and I think I might throw up.

He is dead.

He is dead and I am looking at him.

Rolling carry-on. Wearing a jacket that fits so well it almost throws me off. He's older. Ten years older, same as me, which somehow works better on him, which is deeply unfair and beside the point because he is dead.

I am not seeing this.

I rub one eye with the heel of my hand, hard enough to hurt.

When I open it, he is still there.

My brain offers the only explanation it has.

I am overtired. Under-caffeinated. Running on too much wine and too little respect for my own system. Maybe this is how it happens, losing your mind. You see dead people in airports. You hallucinate your dead husband at a coffee kiosk because your brain is broken and your blood sugar is low and you need to sit down.

He adds one sugar to his coffee.

He always took one sugar.

My knees actually buckle, just enough that I take a step to catch myself, and now I am standing in the middle of a terminal watching a ghost add sugar to his coffee and I know—I know—it's him. It's not a man who looks like him. It's not a trick of the light or the angle or the lack of sleep.

It is Reid.

I know the way he holds a paper cup—both hands, even when it's not cold—and the way he shifts his weight to his left foot and the specific angle of his jaw. I know these things because I was married to them and I buried them and I have been visiting their grave for ten years.

The memory arrives without permission, physical and specific. His hands around a mug at the kitchen table on a Sunday. Both hands. Always both hands. Me reaching over to steal a sip because it drove him crazy and that was the whole point.

I watched them lower a casket. I have a grave I visit on bad days and some medium ones. I cried at the funeral and then I stopped crying and I built an entire life and I have been very, very good at pretending to be perfectly fine.

I am not fine now.

So of course he looks up.

CHAPTER 2

EMMA

He doesn't see me.

He looks up the way people look up in airports—scanning nothing, registering no one. His eyes pass over me and through me and I am just another person standing in the middle of a terminal holding a cup of coffee and he has no reason to look twice.

I should be relieved. I am not relieved. I am a woman whose entire nervous system has just been rewired in the space of thirty seconds and my body has not caught up to the part where I'm supposed to be reasonable about it.

My hands are shaking and my cup is tilting and I correct it without thinking, because apparently I am the kind of person who watches her dead husband buy coffee in an airport and still doesn't spill hers.

By the time I get the cup level, he's already moving.

He takes his coffee and walks to gate 23C. He walks right past me and I hold my breath and smell something—cologne, not the one he used to wear. A few seconds later, he’s thirty feet away at his gate, reading something on his phone.