She turned her head slightly toward him, trying to silently place the elusive word, but he had already composed himself, his profile once more a firm, closed line as he stared resolutely into the void. Elise let it go, consciously releasing the tension in her own shoulders. It was probably nothing, just her mind playing tricks, weaving connections where none existed.
A little later, while fumbling with Elise’s phone for a cartoon, Mara accidentally opened a folder of old family photos. Elise leaned in, curious to see which memory her daughter had stumbled upon. A cascade of sunlit images began to scroll past—glimpses of holidays, birthdays, and backyard barbecues, a digital flipbook of their past.
The veteran’s breath hitched, a sharp, audible sound that cut through the cabin’s hum. His gaze locked onto the screen with an intensity so raw and unguarded that Elise instinctively covered the phone with her hand, confused and alarmed. All color had drained from his face. He tried to steady himself, his knuckles whitening as his fingers gripped the cane, anchoring himself to something solid. His eyes didn’t leave the spot where the image had been, even as Elise lowered the phone. His expression held a mixture of awe and a profound, piercing grief that she could not begin to understand.
Mara leaned close, her whisper barely audible. “Is he okay?” Elise wasn’t sure. The man pressed his lips together into a tight, bloodless line, visibly fighting a wave of emotion that threatened to fracture his composed exterior. She had never seen someone respond to a simple photograph with such visceral intensity. It was, she thought with a chill, as if he had seen a ghost.
Several seconds of strained silence passed before he cleared his throat, his voice thin and strained. “Excuse me,” he managed, the words barely more than an exhale. He stood slowly, pushing himself up with a trembling hand on the armrest, and shuffled toward the lavatory without meeting either of their eyes. Elise watched him go, her unease deepening at the unmistakable tremor in his movements.
The soft click of the lavatory door closing felt definitive. Elise imagined him on the other side, leaning heavily against it, gathering the pieces of his composure. She didn’t know what to make of any of it—his pointed recognition of her necklace, and now this overwhelming, paralyzing response to her grandmother’s portrait. The two reactions were clearly threads of the same story, a story she did not possess.