I didn’t know what to say. He closed the magazine and told me he’d been sitting in 14A on this flight every month for almost a year because someone always sat beside him. “She used to sit where you are,” he said. The woman in 14C had apparently been trying to keep strangers from sitting next to him because every time someone did, he would start asking questions about a woman who had disappeared eleven years ago. I asked who she was, and he said, “My daughter. She was on this route the last time anyone saw her.”
The woman in 14C had been on eleven of those flights because she was the last person who had spoken to his daughter before she vanished. She’d never told the family what happened because she’d been afraid the man would blame her. The $200 wasn’t to protect herself—it was because she knew what he was going to ask me. “He doesn’t just ask whether you’re her,” she whispered when I finally moved into the aisle. “He asks whether you’ve ever seen the photograph.” I told her I hadn’t. She looked relieved, then terrified, and said, “Then don’t let him show you one.”
The man in 14A reached into his bag and pulled out a photograph anyway. It was a picture of a young woman standing beside an airport window, taken eleven years ago. I looked at it once and immediately recognized her—not from the airport, but from somewhere I’d never told anyone about. The man saw my face change and asked what I’d remembered. I couldn’t answer. Then the woman in 14C started crying from the back of the plane, and he turned toward her and said, “You told me she never made it past security. So why does this woman know exactly where my daughter was sitting?”
