The Passenger in 14C
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Somewhere over the sea, a photograph slips out of a sleeping stranger's book. The woman laughing in it has Lena's face, and it was taken thirty years ago.
The man in 14C had been asleep since take-off, which was why it took Lena forty minutes to notice the photograph that had slipped out of his book onto the floor between their seats, and that the woman in it was her.
Not someone like her. Her. The same chipped front tooth, the same thin scar through the left eyebrow, laughing on a beach she had never visited.
She should have woken him. Instead she picked it up and held it on her knee while she thought.
It can't have been taken recently; the colours had faded to orange, and the corners were soft from handling. So it must have been taken thirty years ago, at least, which meant it couldn't have been her. She had been born thirty-one years ago, in a city she knew nothing about, to a woman whose name had never appeared on any document she had been allowed to see.
So the woman on the beach must have been someone who looked exactly like her. And a man who carried that photograph inside a book, on this flight, in the seat beside hers, might not have been there by accident.
She looked at him more carefully. Sixties, grey jumper, a wedding ring worn thin. The book on his lap was a cheap paperback, its pages full of handwritten notes. On the inside cover, someone had written a phone number and, beneath it, her own name.
The man opened his eyes. He looked first at the photograph, then at her, and something in his face gave way.
'She looked for you for twenty years,' he said. 'She'd have known you anywhere. I wasn't sure I would.'
'You must have been watching me since the gate.'
'Since the check-in desk,' he admitted. 'I've been trying to work out the first sentence for three hours. In the end, I pretended to fall asleep and let the photograph do it.'