PART 1: JUST HUG ME FOR A SECOND, SHE SAID—UNAWARE THE STRANGER IN THE BLACK SUIT WAS A BILLIONAIRE

PART 1: THE VOICE MESSAGE AT JFK

I only asked for a second.

A hug. Nothing more.

In the middle of JFK Airport, with Preston’s voice destroying 3 years of my life over a message, I grabbed the lapel of a stranger in a black suit as if he were the last solid thing in the world.

He froze.

Then he hugged me in silence with a strange, almost desperate strength, as if that gesture had also broken something inside him.

I walked away without knowing his name, certain I would never see that man again.

I just did not imagine what 3 days later would do to that certainty.

I arrived early. That was the first thing that went wrong that morning, though I would only understand the scale of the error hours later, in a hotel room in Boston, with the scent of a stranger’s suit jacket still on my hands.

The taxi dropped me off at the door of JFK

Terminal 4 at 9:00 sharp. February insisted on existing outside the glass in the form of light snow cutting through the air and hurried people with wool beanies pulled down to their eyebrows. I got out with my rolling suitcase, my beige coat buttoned to my chin, my mother’s necklace worn against my skin under my sweater.

I had only 1 earbud in my right ear, playing some random song, one of those songs that served only to fill the silence.

The check-in line wound lazily through the lobby, pressed against the plastic stanchions. I stood at the end and did what I always did when I was nervous. I adjusted the corner of my boarding pass until it was perfectly parallel to the edge of my passport. Then I aligned the passport with the strap of my bag. Then I took a deep breath and reminded myself that this

was ridiculous.

I was 27 years and 3 months old. I had a job in Boston that was supposed to distract me from the world, a boyfriend of 3 years who had been looking at me as if I were a meeting he had forgotten to cancel, and a tiny certainty that if I worked hard enough, at some point someone would choose me entirely.

The phone vibrated in my coat pocket.

I pulled it out without looking. I saw his name on the screen.

Preston.

I hesitated for half a second because he hated voice messages and I hated voice messages, and we rarely exchanged anything over the phone that was not dry text with proper punctuation.

I pressed play anyway.

“Eve, hi. Look, I know you’re boarding and maybe this isn’t the time, but I think if I don’t say it now, I never will. I’ve been thinking

a lot. We’ve known for a while that this isn’t working, so…”

A short pause. A sip of something.

“I think it’s best if we break up. I’ll move my things out of your apartment sometime this week. Have a good trip.”

40 seconds.

Maybe 42.

I stood still with the phone pressed to my ear even after the message ended, listening to the echo of his voice compete for space with the mechanical announcement from the loudspeaker.

I took out my earbud. I pressed play again. Then once more, as if it were an audio problem, as if 3 years could fit somewhere other than those 40 seconds.

On the 4th time, the tears came.

I am not one of those women who cries beautifully. I had already realized that at 15, in a mirror, after a silly fight. When I cry, my face swells in uneven red blotches, my nose runs, and my throat makes a sort of choking sound that sounds like an apology.

That was exactly the sound that came out of me in the middle of the check-in line at Terminal 4.

Not quietly.

Not with dignity.

It came out as if it had been waiting 3 years to escape.

The woman in front of me turned around, saw my face, and pulled her young daughter by the hand 1 step to the side. Another woman, 2 steps back, feigned deep interest in the emergency exit signs. The man at the counter, far off, raised his head for a moment and lowered it again.

I was crying while standing in the middle of the lobby without decorum, without a tissue, without anything. The boarding pass trembled between my fingers. The passport did too. The rolling suitcase, leaning against my leg, seemed like the only object in the entire room that still followed any rules.

That was when I turned my face to the right.

It was not a thought.

It was instinct.

The same instinct that makes you look for a wall in an unfamiliar apartment during an earthquake.

I turned my face to the right because the line had moved forward and because the air there seemed more solid.

I found myself facing a man.

He was tall, taller than me, taller than most people in that lobby. He wore a black suit jacket that must have cost more than many people’s rent, a white shirt buttoned to the very top, and gray eyes fixed on me as if I were a math problem his morning had not anticipated. His dark hair was combed back in a methodical way. His hands were crossed in front of his body, 1 over the other, exactly parallel.

Behind him, 3 paces away, 2 men in dark suits looked at me with the expression of people calculating escape routes, and 1 more man, short, held a red notebook against his chest like a crucifix.

I did not know who he was. I did not know who any of them were. It did not occur to me that men dressed like that rarely enter through the same door as the rest of the people, or that if any of them were there, in Terminal 4, on a commercial flight in the middle of a February morning, it must have been because of some mismatch with the life they usually led.

I did not ask.

I took a step toward the man in the suit jacket without letting go of the phone, without dropping the boarding pass, and reached out my right hand until I grabbed his lapel.

The fabric was dense and cold, and I felt somewhere absurdly far from my head that I was staining a coat with mascara that had probably never been stained by anything.

I leaned my forehead against his shoulder.

“Hold me for a second, please,” I said, my entire voice buried under the crying. “Just a second.”

He froze.