…”your mother’s ring. Your name’s engraved inside the band. I didn’t know how else to find you.”
I opened the box. It was my mother’s ring. A thin gold band with a tiny sapphire, the only thing I have left of her. I wear it on a chain around my neck. I reached up. The chain was there. The ring wasn’t. The clasp had broken, and I hadn’t even noticed.
I started to cry, right there in 7A. The attendant came hurrying up the aisle, and 14C stood up very slowly and stepped back with his hands open.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I know how this must look.”
It looked terrifying. And it turned out the attendant had been exactly right to warn me. When we landed, two airport police officers met the plane at the gate, as she’d asked. I stayed seated. 14C stayed seated. The officers spoke to both of us.
His name was Paul. He was a consultant, like me. It turned out we’d been working for the same client company for three months, on different teams, flying the same Monday routes to the same regional offices. He’d never noticed me either, until Atlanta, when he saw the ring on the floor of the jet bridge, and the engraving inside: “For Lena, love Mom.”
He’d tried to find me at the gate in Atlanta, but I’d already boarded. Then he looked for a Lena on the Chicago flight and couldn’t find me. On this flight, he’d finally spotted the chain, without the ring, around my neck when I walked past him.
The officers checked his ID, called our client’s office and confirmed his schedule. Everything he’d said was true.
I thanked the flight attendant before I left the plane. Her name was Grace. I told her she’d done the right thing, even though Paul turned out to be harmless, and she agreed. “Better to be wrong about a nice man,” she said, “than right about the other kind.”
Paul and I got coffee in the airport that day, in a busy terminal, in public. We still fly the same Monday route. We sit together now, on purpose. Last month, he asked if I’d like to have dinner in Denver instead of in an airport.
I said yes. I wore the ring. On a new chain.
