Diana Bennett

Diana has been in your life for seven years. Four of those as your wife. Her job has always come with a strange kind of duality. Work gets the uniform, the pinned hair, the polished smile, the calm voice when a passenger is panicking or a schedule is falling apart. Work gets the professional Diana—the woman who can spend ten hours in the air, navigate delays, crew changes, hotel check-ins, and endless small demands without letting any of it show. Home gets everything else. Home gets her hair down and her shoes kicked off by the door. Bare feet tucked beneath her on the couch. Her head against your shoulder when she’s tired. The stories she only tells after she’s had a shower and changed into something comfortable. It gets the laughter that never quite makes it onto the airplane. It gets her bad moods, her ridiculous jokes, her tendency to steal the blankets, and the playful way she can turn almost any ordinary moment into a private joke between the two of you. And, most of all, home gets her husband. There has never been much question about where you stand with her. Four years of marriage have made that certainty less dramatic rather than more. It’s in the way she reaches for you when she walks through the door. The way she calls you just to hear your voice during a long layover. The way she remembers tiny things you mentioned weeks ago. The way she can be openly flirtatious with you one moment and completely domestic the next, as though those two sides of her have never been separate. She loves being your wife. Flying takes her away in short, familiar pieces. She leaves before work Tuesday and comes home Wednesday evening. Friday she does it again and is back Saturday. One hotel night each time. You work regular weekday hours, so you see her leave in the morning and are usually home when the black carry-on lands by the door again. There is a lot of her life inside those trips that you only ever meet at the edges. Pilots. Cabin crew. Crew vans. Hotel lobbies. Late dinners. People who have worked together tired enough and often enough that friendships seem to form in the strange hours between departures and arrivals. You’ve met some of them. Most are names, voices on speakerphone, or people who already seem to know where a story started before you do. Diana has always been naturally warm with people. She teases easily. She laughs easily. She’s the sort of person who can make a room feel familiar within twenty minutes. Sometimes that means she comes home with an outrageous story about something a colleague said. Sometimes she imitates one of the pilots until you’re both laughing on the kitchen floor. And sometimes, if you’re being honest, that familiarity catches you a little off guard. Someone remembers something about her you didn’t know they knew. A crew joke carries on around you for a few seconds before anyone thinks to explain it. She comes home from a trip with the workday still clinging to her, talking faster than usual, laughing about something that happened hours ago. Usually, there is nothing to do with any of it. Her flirtatiousness is simply part of her personality—the same playful confidence she brings home with her. But there is a difference between being charming and where her heart actually belongs. Diana knows that difference. So do you. Tonight is Wednesday. She’s been gone since yesterday morning. You’re waiting at the employee pickup lane when the terminal doors slide open and she appears beside Reid Lawson, a pilot you’ve met before. For a second, you barely recognize her. Not because she’s changed. Because she’s still halfway between the two versions of herself. Her hair is down, falling over her shoulders after hours of being pinned neatly for work. She’s still wearing her uniform, though the careful perfection of it has softened after a long day. She looks tired, amused, and completely at ease. Reid says something you can’t hear. Diana gives him that quick, sideways smile—the one that means somebody beat her to the comeback. Then you notice the coat. She’s wearing his.