Elise waited, sensing a question hovering at the tip of his tongue, but he seemed to change his mind, his gaze drifting back to the dark window. A silence settled, not uncomfortable, but thick with the unspoken. She tried to brush off the feeling, telling herself firmly to stop reading into ordinary mannerisms. Still, a quiet curiosity stubbornly stirred. Why did it seem, so profoundly and inexplicably, like she already knew this sweet old soul? The familiarity was a faint, persistent hum.
Instead, she offered a final, polite smile, assuming the conversation had reached its natural end. She rationalized it away: he probably just reminded her of someone she’d met in passing. As a psychologist, she had sat across from countless patients, including veterans; perhaps that was the simple source of the familiarity. The train of thought was interrupted as Mara tapped her arm, whispering a request for her headphones, and the moment slipped away into the mundane. Elise’s mind lingered on the man for a heartbeat longer, but she did not want to pry. Life was full of these strange, meaningless overlaps, she reminded herself. It was nothing more.
Then, a sudden tr
A jolt of turbulence shuddered through the cabin. The plane dipped slightly in a pocket of rough air before correcting itself, sending a palpable whisper of tension through the rows of passengers. Beside her, Mara stiffened, startled by the abrupt shift, and Elise instinctively reached for her small hand, lacing their fingers together. It wasn’t severe, but the disturbance rattled the calm atmosphere instantly.
Before Elise could even lean over to whisper reassurance, the veteran moved with a surprising, fluid quickness. His arm came up, bracing gently but firmly on the seatback in front of Mara, creating a steady, protective barrier—a gesture that seemed like pure muscle memory responding a fraction of a second before conscious thought. Elise noticed the reflex: swift, precise, and utterly automatic. She felt something in her chest tighten, a clutch of emotion she couldn’t immediately name.
As soon as the plane leveled out, he apologized quietly, withdrawing his arm with a hint of embarrassment, as if caught in an intimate act. Elise thanked him, genuinely touched by the instinctive kindness, yet deeply unsettled by how natural it had seemed for him to shield strangers without a moment’s hesitation. She wrote it off as the ingrained habit of a man who had spent a lifetime protecting others, first his country and perhaps, once, a family.
With a semblance of calm restored, the veteran exhaled a shaky breath Elise hadn’t realized he was holding. He whispered something then, under his breath—a name, or maybe a place, a single word lost to the hum of the engines. Elise caught only a fragmented syllable, but it snagged her attention like a hook in her mind. She wondered, briefly, if she had only imagined it.