Thirty Thousand Feet
The departure board flickered its endless litany of cities—Rome, London, Zurich, Sicily—and Brianna De Luca stood beneath it with her passport clutched so tightly the corners had begun to soften against her palm. JFK at eleven at night had a strange, hollow beauty to it, all fluorescent light and hushed announcements, the kind of place where a person could disappear into the crowd and, for a few hours, belong to no one.
That was precisely what she wanted. To belong to no one.
"You didn't have to come," she said, not looking at Lorenzo, though she felt the weight of his attention the way one feels the sun on the back of the neck—warm, then too warm, then faintly uncomfortable.
"Of course I did." His voice carried that low, measured calm he used when he wanted to seem reasonable, though Brianna had learned over twenty-six years that calm, in Lorenzo, was often the thinnest of veneers. "You think I'd let you vanish into the night without seeing you off myself?"
"I'm not vanishing. I'm taking a flight. People do it every day."
"Not people like us."
There it was—the particular phrase he liked to use, *people like us*, as though the De Luca name were a species all its own,…