And two more faces in the windows further back, where the strangers would sit. Dana must have told him there would be two more passengers. One face had short dark hair. The other had a long sweep of yellow hair, and he had given both of them smiles.
He had drawn her before he met her. He had drawn her smiling.
She stood holding it at the top of the stairs. Ferris was down on the tarmac now, his flight bag on his shoulder. He looked up at her.
"He dropped this," she said. "I'll give it—"
"No," said Ferris. "You won't." And then, after a moment, more quietly: "Give it here."
She did not move. She was never sure, afterward, why. Only that if she handed it down to him, the drawing would go back where it belonged and she would get into the car Jonah had called and go to the hotel and give her presentation and become the next chief executive of Halden Beauty, and none of this would ever have happened, the way a flight that doesn't go into the logbook never happened.
"I'd like to give it to him myself," she said. "If—if his father allows it."
Ferris looked at her for a long moment. The wind blew rain across the ramp lights.
"Boston Pediatric Heart Center," he said finally. "Tuesday, seven a.m. You read the letter." He turned and walked toward the hangar. Over his shoulder he said, "I'd think hard before you go."
* * *
The hotel was on the waterfront, and her suite looked out over the harbor, and the room service menu offered a twenty-eight-dollar hamburger that she ordered and did not eat. She sat at the desk by the window with the drawing in front of her and the laptop open beside it, Wren's face and Theo's drawing side by side.
At eleven, someone knocked.