“She’s not coming either, is she?” I said.

He looked up.

His eyes were brown, very steady, the kind of eyes that have made a decision and are waiting for the rest of the face to catch up.

“No,” he said. “She’s not.”

I sat down in the seat beside him. Not next to him, exactly. One seat between us, the way strangers sit.

“I’m Melissa.”

“Nathan.”

“My fiancé was supposed to meet me here. We were supposed to fly to Cancun. Honeymoon.”

I pulled the garland off my wrist and held it in my lap.

“Third time he’s done something like this.”

Nathan was quiet for a moment.

“First time for me, but I think she’s been working up to it for a while.”

He exhaled slowly.

“I found a text on her phone 3 weeks ago. I asked her about it. She cried and said it was nothing, and I believed her.”

He said the last two words with the particular self-disgust of someone replaying a decision they already knew was wrong when they made it.

We sat there for a moment in the particular silence of two people who have just been made fools of in the same airport.

Then Carol’s voice came over the intercom.

“Final boarding call for flight 1142 to Cancun. Now boarding all passengers at gate 14.”

I looked at Nathan. He looked at me.

“The tickets already paid for,” I said. “Both of them.”

Something shifted in his expression. Not a smile exactly. More like the look of a person who has been holding a door shut for a long time and just decided to let go.

“You’re serious?”

“I have never been less serious about anything in my life,” I said. “Which is maybe why I’m serious about it.”

He stood up.

He picked up his duffel bag.

He looked at me for one more second.

“My ex had us booked on the same flight,” he said. “Different destination, but I’ve got a valid boarding pass.”

“Then let’s go.”

Carol was watching us from the podium.

When we walked up together, she took our boarding passes without comment. But when she handed them back, she looked at me over the top of her reading glasses and said very quietly, “Good for you, hon.”

We sat in the middle of the plane, Nathan in the aisle seat and me at the window, with the empty seat Derek had paid for between us, like a small monument to the relationship.

Somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, Nathan ordered two ginger ales without asking and handed one to me.

I didn’t say anything. I just took it.

We talked for most of the flight. Not about our exes, not yet. About smaller things first.

He was an architect. I was a physical therapist. He had grown up in Columbus. I was from outside Nashville, but had been in Chicago for 6 years. We were both 31.

We had both, in retrospect, stayed too long in something that wasn’t working because we had convinced ourselves that certainty was the same thing as love.

By the time we landed, something had shifted between us.

Not romance, it was too soon, and we were both too raw for that, but something real.

The specific ease of a person who has seen you at the exact moment you stopped pretending.

We shared a taxi to the resort because it was practical.

We had neighboring bungalows because the hotel had given us the rooms our original reservation specified, and neither of us thought to change it.