The Last Flight

by Julie Clark

But I don’t look away from the curb, my eyes trained on the crowded sidewalk outside the terminal, searching for her, anchoring my belief—and my entire future—on the fact that she will come.

I know only three things about her: her name, what she looks like, and that her flight departs this morning. My advantage—she doesn’t know anything about me. I fight down panic that I might have missed her somehow. That she might already be gone, and with her, the opportunity for me to slip out of this life and into a new one.

People disappear every day. The man standing in line at Starbucks, buying his last cup of coffee before he gets into his car and drives into a new life, leaving behind a family who will always wonder what happened. Or the woman sitting in the last row of a Greyhound bus, staring out the window as the wind blows strands of hair across her face, wiping away a history too heavy to carry. You...

She doesn’t know it yet, but soon, she will become one of the vanished. And I will fade, like a wisp of smoke into the sky, and disappear.

The gym is one of the few places Danielle doesn’t follow, trailing after me with her lists and schedules. It’s where I meet Petra, the only friend I have left from my life before Rory, and the only one Rory hasn’t forced me to abandon. Because as far as Rory knows, Petra doesn’t exist.

“I’m serious. All it takes is one tiny thread connecting your new life to your old one and it’ll all fall apart.” His dark eyes latched onto mine and held. “You can never go back. Not once. Not in any way, ever.”

When she’d gone, Rory set down his fork and said, “This is a four-hundred-dollar bottle of wine. You need to try harder.”

I watch him, as if from a great distance, this man I once loved. The lines around his eyes are evidence of laughter, of happiness that we shared. But those same lines have been deepened by rage as well. A dark violence that has blotted out everything good I once saw in him.

“Anything else?” he asks. His voice is neutral, but something in the set of his shoulders grabs my attention. My instincts—finely tuned after years of reading the subtext of Rory’s tone and expressions—are screaming at me to be careful.

“If we trade tickets, flight records will show each of us boarding our respective airplanes,” Claire said. “But in Puerto Rico, there will be no trace of me. And in Oakland, there will be no trace of you.”

“If you pay attention, Claire, solutions always appear. But you have to be brave enough to see them,”

“This family is like a Venus flytrap—shiny on the surface, but dangerous underneath. And once you know their secrets, they will never let you leave.”

That was the funny thing about regret. It lived inside of you, shrinking down until you could almost believe it had vanished, only to have it spring up, fully formed, called forward by people who meant you no harm.

Identity is a strange thing. Are we who we say we are, or do we become the person others see? Do they define us by what we choose to show them, or what they see despite our best attempts to conceal it?

“It takes a long time to learn how to see the world as a place where people aren’t doing things to you. My husband didn’t set out to break my heart, or Ellie’s. He was just acting on his own desires, living his own story. I hope I’ve become someone who doesn’t get angry when others are just trying to get by. I hope I can be the kind of person who looks toward forgiveness first.”

But what I’ve learned in life is that in order for true forgiveness to occur, something has to die first. Your expectations, or your circumstances. Maybe your heart. And that can be painful. But it’s also incredibly liberating.”

“Do not ever forget who you are and what you mean to me. In a world crowded with noise and selfishness, you are a brilliant flash of kindness.”

“Eva, this is my daughter, Ellie.” Ellie rolled her eyes and stepped forward to shake Eva’s hand. “I go by Danielle now. It’s nice to finally meet you.”