I was bringing my girlfriend home to meet my parents for the holidays. After the plane took off, I went to use the restroom.
When I came back, she was gone from the seat beside me.
I flagged down a flight attendant. She told me I'd boarded alone.
I asked the other passengers. They all said there had never been anyone sitting next to me.
But I had boarded that plane with my girlfriend. I knew I had.
She'd just peeled an orange for me, told me it would be waiting when I got back from the restroom.
How could she simply vanish?
I stared at the peeled orange sitting on her seat and demanded they search the cargo hold and the cockpit.
My shouting forced an emergency landing at the nearest airport.
Airport police boarded the plane and tore it apart, top to bottom. They didn't find my girlfriend. They couldn't even find a record that she existed.
They contacted my parents. My parents said I'd always been single, that I'd never had a girlfriend at all.
In the end, I was locked in a psychiatric facility. The other patients beat me to death.
When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day I was supposed to bring my girlfriend home to meet my parents.
——
"Ernest Fox, what are you spacing out for? It's boarding time. Come on, let's go."
Amy Pruitt waved two boarding passes in the air, smiling at me.
Looking at that warm, gentle smile, a violent shudder ripped through my body.
I'd been reborn.
I was twenty-seven. Amy and I had been together for three full years. I'd decided to use the holiday trip to bring her home and introduce her to my parents.
I never could have imagined that this one decision would make her vanish without a trace and cost me my life.
Going over everything that had happened in my previous life, I still couldn't make sense of any of it.
I couldn't understand how Amy, a living, breathing person, could simply disappear mid-flight.
I couldn't understand why the flight attendants and passengers, who had watched us board together with their own eyes, all insisted in unison that they'd never seen Amy.
I couldn't understand why my parents, who had always doted on me, who knew full well I'd been dating Amy for three years, told the police I'd never had a girlfriend.
"Ernest, you look terrible. Are you feeling okay?"
Amy was watching me, concern written all over her face.
My heart ached.
Three years together. She'd always been so good to me. She knew my stomach was sensitive, so even though she'd never cooked a day in her life before, she taught herself. Every single day, without fail, she made me three meals. Over a thousand days and nights, and she'd never once picked a fight with me.
That was why, in my previous life, her disappearance had sent me into a frenzy. I'd fought tooth and nail to find her.
I still didn't know what had really happened last time. But this time, I refused to make the same mistakes.
I looked at Amy, dread clawing at my chest.
"What if we skip this flight? We could rebook, or take the train instead."
Amy blinked, then gave me an indulgent smile.
"Don't be silly."
"It's peak travel season. There aren't any tickets left."
"We spent three days refreshing just to grab these seats. If we give them up, we're not getting home at all."
She was right. Rebooking or switching wasn't realistic.
But the moment I thought about what had happened last time, how boarding this exact flight had ended with one of us dead and the other gone, panic clawed its way back up my throat.
What was I supposed to do?
Was there really no other way?
Wait.
The reason I'd been thrown into that psychiatric facility last time was that no one besides me could prove Amy had ever been on the plane.
So this time, all I had to do was make sure there was evidence she'd boarded with me.
The second the thought hit, I pulled out my phone. I linked my arm through Amy's as we walked toward the gate, and I started taking photos of the two of us like a man possessed.
