PART 1 — ROW THIRTY-FOUR
Twenty-five years. Five children.
I did the lunches and the fevers and the school plays and the running of a house on whatever was in the account that week, and Gideon built a career, and Gideon liked the word breadwinner and used it at other people’s dinner tables.
He very rarely mentioned what made sixty-hour weeks possible.
So when he came home in the March with an envelope and said we were going to the islands for the anniversary, I thought, all right. He has finally noticed.
At the desk at Ardmore I had the two passports and he had the booking on his phone.
The girl printed the passes and handed them across and I looked at mine.
Row thirty-four.
I looked at his.
“You booked yourself first class?”
“My back can’t do six hours in those seats.”
“Then why not two?”
And my husband took the pass out of my hand — took it, turned it over, checked it, and held on to it — and said it to a queue of about twenty-five people:
