“Captain,” she said, her voice trembling slightly into the handset. “There is an urgent matter in the forward galley. Your… your wife, Jessi, is here.”
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Ten seconds later, the heavy cockpit door unlocked and clicked open. Luca stepped out, his pilot cap in his hand, a confident smirk still lingering on his lips—until his eyes met mine.
The smirk vanished instantly. His jaw dropped. His eyes darted past me toward first class, then back to my face, going as ash-white as his crisp uniform shirt.
“Jessi…?” he stammered, his voice dropping to a panicked whisper. “What… what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at home.”
“We came to surprise you for your birthday, Luca,” I said softly, stepping closer so the surrounding crew couldn’t hear every word. “Leo saved his allowance to buy a ticket. He hid behind a magnet rack in the terminal so you wouldn’t see us. He drew a picture for you.”
Luca looked like he was about to pass out. “Jessi, listen to me, I can explain—”
“You just proposed to your mistress over the intercom of a commercial flight,” I interrupted, my voice dropping into a deadly, quiet register. “While your seven-year-old son was listening in row twenty-eight.”
He reached out to grab my arm. “Jessi, please—”
“Don’t touch me,” I warned, stepping back.
At that moment, the first officer poked his head out of the cockpit, looking between us with immense tension. “Captain, ground control is requesting our pushback clearance. We’re losing our departure slot.”
Luca looked utterly paralyzed, caught between the microphone proposal he had just made to first class, the wife standing in front of him with a fire in her eyes, and a plane full of passengers.
“I’m taking our son off this plane,” I told him, turning my back on him. “And when you land in Chicago to start your ‘new life,’ you can explain to your chief pilot why your personal affairs just grounded a flight.”
