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time Fiona could not hear any conversation. Instead she watched the check-in progress beside her, saw the passengers produce driver’s licenses and in one case a maroon passport.
    Then Edie was back, looking perplexed. “I don’t know what to tell you. A Lee Pienaar was scheduled for Flight 886, but he never checked in. He wasn’t on the next flight either. You’ll need to check with Day Star if he was actually on their shuttle. Unfortunately, they’re a Western outfit; they have no presence here. And we have no way to check their manifests.” She sighed. “I’m sorry.”
    â€œNo, you’ve helped a lot. Can I call them?”
    Edie’s face relaxed. “Of course you can. I’ll get you the number.”
    â€œThanks.” Now— now— she could find out where he was.
    As soon as she had the number, written on a Post-it bearing the Voyager logo, Fiona retreated to a seat in the arrivals lounge. The waiting area was once again full. Evidently, flights were still arriving from other cities.
    The area code she pressed in was unfamiliar, but a cheerful voice informed her that the corporate offices in Santa Fe were closed on weekends and would reopen tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.
    No! I have to talk to you now! Didn’t they have an emergency contact number? Maybe it was on their website. But if she sent an e-mail, would somebody read it before Monday morning?
    This can’t be happening. They had plans for the evening, a life to get on with. How could she wait until tomorrow morning to find anything out? But maybe she wouldn’t have to. She imagined him leaving his phone on the shuttle flight, realizing it when he got to Denver, and running back desperately to retrieve it. The airline couldn’t find the phone, and Flight 886 had departed in the meantime. The next flight from Denver was already full.
    So now he was headed for LaGuardia Airport without his phone to let her know. And if her cell number was stored on his lost phone . . . he probably wouldn’t know it from memory, since he had never had to dial it. He knew her apartment landline, but of course she wasn’t there.
    That jerked her up in her seat. There were probably messages, multiple messages, waiting for her back in Sydney Beach. She cursed herself for never bothering to learn the retrieval code to pick up her messages remotely. But between e-mails and texts to her iPhone, no calls to her apartment phone ever seemed that urgent.
    Until now.

Chapter Seven
    S TALLED AT A traffic light in Eastport, Fiona realized she had forgotten about their dinner reservations. No chance of making those now. Would the Diligent Farmer restaurant give them a second chance later if they just didn’t show up? No, they had her landline number. She had to be the one to cancel.
    If Lee was landing at La Guardia, would there be enough time to shoot over to Brooklyn? But it was a large airport and she had no idea what airline they might put him on. No, it was better to go home.
    As the light changed, Fiona considered something else. Lee traveled widely, both for his own photography and on assignment, and had never lived a workaday life. For the last four years, she hadn’t either. If he woke up, as he had in April, and decided they should drive to Jekyll Island in Georgia, he knew that she would be happy to go too.
    Was it possible that in the airport he had heard about some unbelievably beautiful place to photograph, a spot that he could not miss, especially since he was already out there? Perhaps he had rented a car and headed out impulsively, thinking he would just get a later plane. She saw him lost, running out of gas in the mountains where there was no phone service. Even now he was waiting by the side of the road, desperate, hoping that someone would come by . . .
    Fiona turned onto Sunrise Highway. A year ago they hadn’t even known each other, though he had read her travel writing and