Chapter One
I am calm ? Je suis calme
I am unbothered ? Je suis indifférent
I am thriving ? Je m’épanouis
Of all the many psychological tricks Layla Bailey had played on herself in preparation for this—only her second trip ever to her favorite…
well, was it better to say, former favorite?
onetime favorite? nostalgic, painful, heartbreaking favorite?
…city in the world—typing positive affirmations into her translation app was possibly the most personally embarrassing.
Worse than the hours she’d spent not just packing, but planning her packing, complete with careful searching online for aggressively neutral outfit ideas, the kind that she thought would make her seem quietly sophisticated, quietly committed to not pulling any awkward focus.
Worse than the Google Doc she’d labored over on late nights after long shifts, a color-coded itinerary that did little to soothe her, especially when her eyes encountered the blocks of time she’d turned bright yellow, unignorable reminders of the unavoidable.
Worse even than the breezy, dishonest text reply she’d sent off to Cara before the cabin doors closed.
I genuinely feel fine, I promise! she’d written to her closest friend, whose asks about this trip had grown increasingly concerned over the last two weeks, and whose most recent message had read, You can use me as an excuse if you want to cancel.
But this translation app trick?
This translation app trick had her feeling as though all her preparations had been in vain.
Breezy lies she’d been telling herself for weeks.
She pressed the button on the side of her phone to darken the screen, then leaned her head back.
Je m’épanouis, she could still see behind her now-closed eyes, a mocking afterglow.
A translation app probably couldn’t even be trusted with an expression like that.
But then again, Layla thought, she probably couldn’t be trusted with those translation app sentiments at the moment, either.
After all, maybe it was impossible to feel like you were thriving when you were six hours into a transatlantic flight, in a middle seat way in the back because you waited too long to book your ticket, the people on either side of you absolutely dominating your armrests, your eyes dry and your neck cricked, your wireless headphones long since lost their charge.
Maybe this was simply a mind-over-matter moment.
And Layla liked to think she excelled at mind over matter.
She took a breath through her nose, imagined wiping those silly affirmations from the whiteboard in her brain.
She didn’t really need affirmations, anyway.
She had neutral outfits. She had that itinerary, which would actually be perfect if she swapped out the yellow for something less loud.
A pale green, maybe. A beige, if such a thing was available in Google Docs.
And Cara could simply take her texts at face value.
She wouldn’t—couldn’t—understand all this, anyway. Cara had never been married, and the thing was, marriages were their own universes. Hers and Jamie’s especially, she’d always thought.
They had been a family.
This trip was about family.
The family she’d vowed was forever.
And the family she’d been doing her best to avoid for the better part of two years.
Another shaky breath, another clearing wipe across the busy whiteboard of her mind.
Better not to think too much yet about family and what you owed them, about Jamie, about universes and how they ended.
Those things, you needed fresh air for. Available armrests, at the very least. The flight was nearly over, and for the next ninety minutes or so, all Layla needed to do was keep her mind as clear as she could. Keep her hands off that app.
Except then the announcement came.
It was muffled at first, a crackle in the plane’s speaker.
French to start, like all the announcements had been throughout the flight, and Layla’s fingers twitched on her phone, though she knew the flight attendant’s lightly accented English would follow.
It was probably about customs procedures for landing, or another pass through the cabin to collect trash, or—
Médecin, Layla heard.
She didn’t need the app for that.
By the time the flight attendant switched to English, Layla had unbuckled and leaned forward, clearing her throat delicately at the armrest hog in the aisle seat, who turned to look at her with an expression of surprise.
Layla gave him a polite smile, the sort that sat as naturally on her face as a pair of scrubs on her body.
She’d call it her professional smile, but what boundaries she had between the personal and the professional weren’t all that clear to her these days.
It just felt like her smile. And maybe it wasn’t the kind of smile that said she was thriving, but she was pretty sure it said calm and unbothered in any language.
So when the man stood from his seat to let Layla pass, she didn’t need any psychological tricks at all.
In the aisle, she Face ID’d back into her phone, swiped out of the translation app without even thinking about it, and pulled up the copy of her medical license she kept in her photo library.
In this moment, there was no Paris, no Jamie.
No family she’d failed, and no universes ending.
There was only this plane and this patient, and that sounded near enough to how she’d been living her life lately that she felt right at home.
By the time she made her way to the closest flight attendant, Layla wondered if perhaps she might not be needed—this was a big plane, a full flight, and she imagined that there was at least one other qualified physician on board.
But judging by the plain relief on the uniformed man’s face, Layla was going to be doing this solo, and while a little pulse of adrenaline thrummed through her—this had never happened to her before, and she’d taken a lot of flights over the last couple of years—she still felt perfectly in control.
She was good at her job. Good at keeping a cool head in a crisis.
In as hushed a tone as the white noise whir of the cabin would allow, the flight attendant—Marc, his name tag read—told her there was a young woman in business class who fainted on her way back from the plane’s lavatory. She was awake now, but quiet, a little confused. She was traveling alone.
“She is American,” Marc said, in that beautifully French way. Ah-merry-ken. “So we will not need to translate.”
Layla nodded, but heat rose to her cheeks as he turned to lead the way up the aisle. She hoped he hadn’t somehow seen her doing the affirmations.
In business class—despite the pleasant accommodations, especially compared to the sardine can where she’d been seated—Layla felt something familiar in the air, a tense temperature she knew from walking into hundreds of hospital rooms. A silent, someone is sick restlessness that was an infection all on its own.
A couple of passengers craned their necks to look at her and Marc, brows furrowed in anxious concern.
They’d probably seen the young woman faint.
Don’t worry, Layla thought, silently telegraphing comfort to all of them. I’m calm.
And when Marc gestured toward one of the curved half pods in the middle row, another flight attendant rising from the crouched position she’d been in beside the seat, Layla proved it.
She blocked everything out but the girl in front of her, and did her job.
It was quiet work, the kind Layla excelled at: observing, listening, prompting.
There was a small black kit left by Marc at her feet, but Layla didn’t open it yet.
Instead, she talked to fifteen-year-old Willa: not only about how she felt (“Better now. Sort of woozy still”), but also about where she was headed (to visit her aunt and uncle and cousins, her first time doing this trip alone), and about the book she was clutching in her lap (“There’s this fae prince,” she told Layla, voice pitching into liveliness, “and he’s in love with this mortal girl”).
Layla watched Willa’s face carefully as she talked, looking for—but thankfully not seeing—abnormalities that would suggest something amiss with her cranial nerves.
She noted the grayish tint to Willa’s skin; she listened to the arid clicking sound the girl’s mouth made during a particularly long sentence.
And when Willa was ready—when she was detailing how the fae prince’s mother gave the mortal girl a dose of deadly poison—Layla made use of the subpar tools in the kit.
She listened to Willa’s chest, checked her blood pressure, measured her respiration and heart rate.
Layla asked mild questions about Willa’s trip and her book and the five friendship bracelets she had stacked on her right wrist, but in between she asked other things: could Willa squeeze two of Layla’s fingers, did she take any medication, how much had she had to eat and drink today.
It wasn’t complicated, as cases go, and one thing about Layla’s line of work was, she was well acquainted with complicated.
What Willa needed was some snacks and a drink and probably a longer adjustment period with the new meds she’d started last week for her ADHD before taking a transatlantic flight.
Since the ship on the latter had long since sailed, Layla focused on getting Willa hydrated and fed.
“The food on this plane is not good,” the girl said at the suggestion, so dramatically that Layla had to press her lips together to stop a laugh.
“Let’s try a little something anyway,” she said smoothly, switching from her crouched position to sit fully in the aisle. She kept her face placid through a disturbing thought about an airplane floor’s cleanliness, then smiled up at Willa when she was newly settled.