The cup had already trembled twice before takeoff, but no one had thought it anything more than the jolting of the pushback tug.
Noah Lemaitre had placed two fingers on the lid to keep the coffee from escaping through the opening. The white plastic vibrated on the lowered tray table, moved a millimeter forward, then back. Above the center aisle, the seat belt sign had been on since boarding, an orange figure bent over a buckle. In a few minutes, the symbol would go dark. The coffee would cool. Flight GW623 would leave Paris twenty-seven minutes late, and all of this would join the things forgotten before the plane had even landed.
He checked his watch, then the time on his phone. Eleven forty-six. He had planned on eleven nineteen at pushback, eleven thirty-two on the runway, three twenty in Montreal, twenty minutes at passport control if the European arrivals were not backed up. Claire had texted him three times not to promise Lucie an arrival time.
He knew how these Fridays went, though.
Since Claire had accepted the job in Montreal and taken Lucie with her for two years, Noah had turned visits into itineraries. On Fridays, the same flight when the price allowed; a carry-on to avoid waiting at the carousel; the same train on arrival; takeout from a small restaurant near Claire’s place. He had learned immigration’s quiet hours the way you learn a neighborhood’s shortcuts. Every detail reduced the role of chance, and that reduction looked enough like reliability for him to cling to it.
Last time, the plane had made up twenty-two minutes over the Atlantic. He remembered that more clearly than the forty minutes he had then spent waiting for his luggage, because that second detail did not serve his calculation.
“Excuse me.”
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