THE WOMEN WE THOUGHT WE'D BE

I found the gate before I found them, the way I always do, scanning a crowd for the particular shape of people I've loved for thirty-three years before I can even read the signage. Vivian was the one standing, of course, parked at the window with her carry-on balanced upright like it had been trained to behave, scrolling through something on her phone with the small crease between her eyebrows that meant work had followed her to the airport again. Mara had claimed three seats for herself, one for her body and two for her bags, and was eating pretzels out of a bag the size of a pillow. Elena saw me first.

"There she is," Elena said, and she was up and out of her seat before I'd even gotten close, wrapping both arms around me like it had been three years instead of eight months. She smelled like the same drugstore perfume she'd worn in college, something with vanilla in it, and I felt my shoulders drop an inch just from that.

"You look like you slept on the plane already," Mara said, not standing, waving a pretzel in my direction instead. "That's not a compliment, by the way."

"I was up at four. David insisted on driving me, and then he insisted on telling me the whole way that he still thinks checked bags are a scam."

"David's not wrong," Vivian said, without looking up from her phone. "He's just annoying about it."

I dropped into the empty seat next to Mara and let my bag slide off my shoulder onto the floor, and for a second the four of us just sat there grinning at each other like we always did at the start of these things, like the gate itself was already an accomplishment. Mara offered me the pretzel bag. I took a handful I didn't actually want.

"Where's Jo?" Elena asked, glancing toward the escalators the way she'd apparently been doing on a loop since she sat down. "She texted me an hour ago saying she was almost through security."

"She texted me the same thing forty minutes ago," I said.

"She'll be the one running down the hall with her shoes untied," Mara said. "She's always the one running down the hall."

It was true, and saying it out loud made something in my chest unclench. Jo had been late to our graduation photos. Jo had been late to Mara's first wedding, sliding into a pew two minutes before the doors closed with her hair still wet. Jo organized everything down to the hour and then arrived breathless and apologetic to the very events she'd built, as if the planning itself used up all the time she needed to actually show up for things. It was a joke among us, affectionate and worn smooth from use. None of us thought, sitting there, that this time it might not be a joke.

Vivian finally put her phone face-down on her knee. "She's not answering me," she said. "I texted her twenty minutes ago to tell her they'd started priority boarding and she just left me on read."

"She's probably running," Elena said again, but her eyes had gone to the departure board overhead, to the little letters that said BOARDING in the stark way they do, giving nothing away.

We talked over it the way you do when you don't want to look directly at the thing that's bothering you. Mara told a long, winding story about the woman at the rental car counter who'd tried to upsell her into a convertible in a tropical climate, "as if I want my hair to look like I've been electrocuted for a week." Elena pulled out her phone to show us a photo her youngest, Daniela, had sent from her dorm room, something about a broken mini-fridge and a roommate who left eggshells in the compost bin, and we all laughed in the right places, and underneath the laughing I kept glancing at the gate agent, at her headset and her clipboard, the particular posture of someone who is about to announce something you don't want to hear.

"General boarding for flight 1407 to San Juan is now underway," she said into the microphone, and group after group filed past us toward the jet bridge, and still no Jo.

"Maybe she's already on," Mara said. "Maybe she got priority boarding somehow and she's sitting up front laughing at us."

"Jo doesn't fly priority," Vivian said. "Jo flies the cheapest seat on the plane and then complains that her knees are in her chest the entire time."

"She could've changed," Mara said, but even she didn't sound like she believed it.

I texted Jo myself then, something simple. Where are you? We're about to board. I watched the three gray dots that meant someone was typing appear and then vanish, appear and vanish again, like she kept starting a sentence and losing her nerve in the middle of it.

"She's typing," I said, and the three of us leaned toward my phone like it might tell us something the screen itself wasn't saying.

The dots disappeared for good. Nothing came through.

"This is the final boarding call for flight 1407 to San Juan," the agent said. "All remaining passengers, please proceed to the gate at this time."

Elena stood up like something had shocked her. "We have to go," she said. "If we miss this flight because we're sitting here waiting for her—"

"She told us to go ahead if she was running late," Vivian said, already reaching for her bag, already moving into the version of herself that makes decisions quickly and doesn't apologize for it. "Her words. Weeks ago. If I'm not there, go, I'll catch the next one."

"That was a hypothetical," I said. "That was Jo being Jo, trying to make us feel better about the possibility, not an actual plan for what to do if it happened."

"It's happening," Mara said, gathering her bags off the extra seats. "Hypothetical or not."

We moved toward the gate in a clump, the way we always moved through airports, too close together, bumping shoulders, nobody quite willing to be the one who fell behind. I kept my phone in my hand the whole walk down the jet bridge, the screen angled so I could see it without looking like I was watching it, which of course meant I was doing nothing but watching it. The accordioned walls of the bridge smelled like jet fuel and recycled air, and somewhere below us a baggage cart beeped in reverse, and I thought, stupidly, that Jo was going to come jogging up behind us any second now with her bag banging against her hip, laughing at herself, telling us some ridiculous story about a line at security that stretched to the parking garage.

She didn't.

We found our row, two seats and two seats across the aisle, and Elena took the window next to me and immediately pressed her forehead to the glass like she could will Jo into existence on the tarmac below. Mara and Vivian settled in across from us, Mara already fighting with the seatback pocket, Vivian already back on her phone, trying one more time.

"Still nothing," Vivian said. "Not even delivered. Her phone might be off."

"Maybe she's already boarded a different flight," I said. "Maybe there was some mix-up with the booking and she's already down there and she'll be standing at baggage claim when we land, annoyed that we worried."

Nobody answered that, because nobody believed it, including me.

The flight attendants moved through the cabin doing the last checks, folding down tray tables that passengers had already lowered, telling a man two rows up to put his bag fully under the seat in front of him. The door to the jet bridge was still open, that rectangle of gray light and airport noise, and I watched it the way you watch a door in a hospital waiting room, like staring hard enough might change who walks through it.

"They're going to close it," Elena said quietly, not moving her forehead from the window.

"They haven't yet," I said.

"They're going to."

And then, as if she'd ordered it, a flight attendant near the front swung the heavy door shut with both hands, and it made a sound like a vault, final and total, and something in my stomach dropped the way it does when a plane hits turbulence, except we hadn't moved yet. We were still sitting perfectly still on the ground, and I still felt it anyway.

"Ladies and gentlemen, flight attendants, prepare the cabin for departure."

My phone buzzed in my hand. I almost dropped it.

Elena's head came off the glass so fast I heard her neck crack. "Is it her?"

I looked down. One text, no explanation, no punctuation beyond the period she always used even in texts, the one habit of hers that had never once let up in thirty-three years, right down to a message this short.

Go without me.

I read it twice, like the second reading might soften it, or lengthen it, or turn it into the explanation I wanted instead of the one I'd gotten. It didn't.

"What does it say?" Mara leaned across the aisle, straining against her seatbelt, which she had already, somehow, managed to buckle.

I turned the phone so they could all see it, the three of them crowding close, Elena actually gripping my wrist to pull the screen nearer, as if proximity would produce more words.

"That's it?" Vivian said. "That's the whole text?"

"That's the whole text."

"No 'I'm sorry.' No 'car trouble.' No 'I'll explain later,'" Mara said. "Just, go without me. Like she's telling us to start dinner without waiting for her to get home from work."

"Text her back," Elena said. "Ask her what's going on. Ask her if she's okay."

I was already typing. Jo, what's happening, are you okay, where are you, no punctuation of my own because my thumbs were moving faster than my sense of grammar, and I hit send and watched the little indicator spin and then show delivered, and then nothing. No dots. No reply. The flight attendant was coming down the aisle now checking seatbelts, and she paused at our row, her eyes doing the quick count of four women and four seats and some unspoken sense that something had shifted among us in the last ninety seconds.

"Everything all right here?" she asked, the way they're trained to ask, pleasant and slightly wary.

"Fine," I said, which is the thing I say, the reflex that comes before I've even decided whether it's true. "Thank you."

She moved on. The engines were starting to hum under us in that low building way, and I felt the plane begin its slow pull back from the gate, and I thought about Jo somewhere in that terminal, or not in that terminal, or somewhere else entirely, typing four words and then going dark.

"Maybe her flight got rebooked," Elena said, still trying to build something out of nothing. "Maybe there's a connection issue, and she's going to meet us there tomorrow, and this is her way of saying, don't wait up, don't change your plans, I'll figure it out."

"Maybe," Vivian said, in a tone that meant she didn't think so.

Mara sat back in her seat, pretzel bag forgotten in her lap, and looked out at the tarmac workers in their orange vests waving their arms at the plane like they were conducting something. "She planned this whole trip," she said. "Every hotel reservation, every restaurant, that whole spreadsheet she sent us with the color-coded itinerary. Jo doesn't miss her own plans. Jo doesn't even miss other people's plans."

"I know," I said.

"So what does it mean, that she's missing this one?"

I didn't have an answer. None of us did. The plane finished its turn and began rolling toward the runway, and outside the window the terminal slid past and shrank, all those other gates with their own small departures and small goodbyes, none of them, as far as I knew, anything like this. I kept my phone in my palm, screen up, waiting for it to buzz again, for three words to become ten, for ten to become an explanation I could carry onto the island with me and hand to the others like something solved.

It didn't buzz again. Not before takeoff, not as the plane lifted and banked and the gray sprawl of the airport gave way beneath us to highway and then coastline, not in the long quiet after that when Elena finally sat back and closed her eyes, not when Mara reopened her pretzels and ate them without really tasting them, not when Vivian put her phone away at last and stared instead at the seatback in front of her like it had personally wronged her.

I looked at the empty seat that should have been Jo's, two rows back, a stranger in a baseball cap already asleep against the window where she should have been sitting, and I thought about all the other things Jo had never once in thirty-three years failed to show up for, and I had no idea, not the smallest idea, what could possibly have kept her from this one.