I tapped the name field at the top of the passenger profile.
The name printed in clean, digital letters was Adam Gibson.
I reached out and smoothed the leather headrest of seat two-A, my silver wedding band catching the blue cabin lights of the Boeing 767. The leather was cool under my palm, smelling of fresh conditioning spray and plastic wrapping. Our flight, eight-forty to Florence, was still an empty shell, waiting for the rush of passengers to fill the aisles with their heavy bags and hurried breathing.
Evelyn Clark, our flight lead, walked down the narrow aisle with a stack of blue linen pillows under her arm. She had been with the airline for twenty-six years, her southern drawl always a steadying anchor during late-night oceanic crossings, but today she had a look on her face that made me stop. She stood by the row, her eyes darting between her handheld passenger terminal and the seat back in front of me, her fingers tapping against the plastic casing.
“Evelyn, are you sure about the spelling?” I asked.
Evelyn patted her hair bun, her fingers smoothing a stray gray strand, a gesture she only made when the standby list was deep or a mechanical delay was looming.
“Right there on the manifest, sugar,” Evelyn said, her voice dropping to a low murmur that did not carry past the bulkhead. She tapped her fingernail against the rugged screen of her tablet. “Gibson, party of two. Checked in at the main terminal forty minutes ago.”
“He told me he was flying to Nashville at noon,” I said, my finger tracing the edge of my silver watch. “He had a three-day conference with a real estate group. He even left his light gray suit out on the valet stand.”
“Well, unless Nashville moved to Tuscany, he is booked on flight eight-forty to Florence,” Evelyn said. She set the pillows down on seat two-B, her movements unusually deliberate. “I checked the passport details on the reservation file. The date of birth matches, Dakota. It is his passport number.”
“There has to be a clerical error with this booking,” I said, repeating the words to hear how they sounded in the quiet cabin. “Maybe the system duplicated a profile from an old flight. He has not flown to Europe in three years, not since we went to Paris for our anniversary.”
