HER HUSBAND... CHAPTER TWO - by Khadijah Mohammed

That's not possible," I said. "You're mistaken. He was on that flight." Miss Phillip looked at me the way people look at something breakable. "Ma'am, I understand this is—" "You're wrong." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. "Check again. Check the manifest again." "I don't need to check it again." She said it gently, but there was something firm underneath the gentleness now, something that had decided this conversation had to end a certain way. "Mr. Bryne is the CEO of Queen Airlines. We would know if he boarded one of our own flights. We would know before anyone." The words didn't land right. I heard them, I understood each one on its own, but put together they refused to make sense, the way a sentence in a language you almost speak refuses to resolve into meaning no matter how many times you turn it over. "He told me he was on that flight." My hands had started shaking. "He called me this morning. Before it took off. He told me—" "Mum." Vanessa's hand found my arm. I hadn't noticed her step closer. "I need to see the manifest," I said. "I want to see it with my own eyes." "Ma'am, that's confidential passenger information, I can't—" "He's my husband!" "And he's not on it," she said, and for the first time her voice lost its softness entirely. "I've told you three times now. He is not on it." The fear that had been sitting in my chest since the radio announcement curdled into something else, something hot and defensive, and I heard myself say things I wouldn't fully remember later — that she didn't know what she was talking about, that someone had made a mistake, that I would go over her head, that I would call the board myself, William sat on that board, William built half of what she was standing in right now. Corey had gone very quiet beside me, the way he did when things got too loud, and it was the sight of his face, pale and still, that finally cut through whatever had taken hold of me. Miss Phillip didn't argue anymore. She just waited, patient in a way that felt almost cruel, until I ran out of things to say. "I'm sorry," she said again, and I couldn't tell if she meant it or if it was just a phrase she'd been trained to reach for. "If there's any update, someone will call you directly." There was nothing left to push against. I took my children's hands and walked them back out through the same door we'd come in, past the crowd still pressed against the barricades, past the wailing and the shouting, none of it reaching me the way it had twenty minutes before. I felt like I was moving through the airport underwater. We got in the car. I don't remember starting it. I don't remember most of the drive, except for the silence, thick and wrong, filling up the space where the radio should have been. The moment we pulled into the driveway I was calling him again. Once. Twice. By the tenth try the kids had already gone inside, and I sat alone in the car in front of our house calling my husband's number over and over, and every single time it didn't ring, didn't go to voicemail, didn't do anything but tell me, in that flat automated voice, that the number I was trying to reach was unavailable. I went inside. I don't know what I said to the kids, if I said anything at all. I went straight up to our bedroom and I don't know what I was looking for exactly, only that I needed to find something, anything, that would make the last two hours make sense again. I started with his side of the closet. I pulled shirts off hangers and let them fall to the floor. I emptied drawers onto the bed, cufflinks and old watches and receipts I didn't recognize, spreading it all out like if I just looked at enough of his things at once, some pattern would surface. Nothing did. Everything was exactly as boring and as William as it always was — his suits, his cologne, the ridiculous number of the same white undershirt folded in threes the way he always folded them, obsessive, precise, the way he did everything. And then, at the very back of the closet, behind a row of shoes he never wore, my hand closed around something small and cool. The bracelet. I'd made it for him our second year together, back when I still had the patience for beading, back when we still had time for things like that. He'd worn it every day for years and then, sometime in the last year or two, I'd stopped seeing it on his wrist and assumed, without really thinking about it, that it had finally broken or worn through. I hadn't asked. I'd let it go the way you let go of a hundred small things in a marriage that's still, on the surface, working. He hadn't lost it. He'd hidden it. I stood there holding it, turning it over in my fingers, and something about finding it made me look harder, made me push aside the shoes and reach further back into the dark of the closet, and that's when my hand hit the bag. It was heavier than it looked. I dragged it out into the light and unzipped it and had to sit back on my heels when I saw what was inside — bricks of cash, wrapped and stacked, more money than I had ever seen outside of a film. I didn't count it in any organized way. I just started pulling stacks out, doing rough math in my head, and the number that came together in my mind was so large it stopped feeling real. Five hundred million. Maybe more. I sat on the floor of our closet surrounded by his shirts and his shoes and half a billion dollars in cash and tried, over and over, to replay the morning. The call before dawn, his voice low so he wouldn't wake the kids, telling me he loved me, telling me he'd call when he landed, nothing in his tone that had struck me as wrong at the time. I went further back — last night, dinner, the two of us at the table while Corey argued with Vanessa about something forgettable. Nothing. No warning. No sign. Just William, being William, right up until he apparently hadn't been anywhere near that plane at all. I put the bracelet in my pocket and left the bag exactly where it was and walked back into his side of the room, standing in the wreckage I'd made of it, and for the first time I let myself ask the question directly instead of circling it. Had my husband run. Or had someone taken him.

Her Husband

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