Page 22 of Crosswind

I showed him before I posted them. He said it was fine. I thought visible meant incidental. I didn't consider how closely people would look — or how quickly fragments could become identification.

The first question appeared on Thursday under the terrace photograph. Then someone posted a picture from the waterfront, not mine, a stranger’s, Jan and me together, both of us visible. By Saturday it had been reposted across several accounts. Someone matched Jan's profile to his LinkedIn page and published his name.

I scroll back to the beginning. I read from the start.

ok I found him. Jan Novak. Head of Finance. Amsterdam.

so Patrick is… not straight?

wait what about Maya

so he was lying to her the whole time?

Patrick Sutton is cancelled

I read it again. Then again. The terminal moves around me, arrivals, departures, the ordinary Sunday morning machinery of Schiphol, and I stand in the middle of it and feel something cold settle in my chest.

Not for me.

For Jan.

I look up. Jan is watching me with the stillness of someone who has been sitting with this and has learned its exact shape. He is not upset, or if he is, he has already processed it and arrived at somewhere past upset. He is just here, waiting, giving me the space to be wherever I am.

"How long," I say.

"The first question appeared Thursday," he says. "It became this last night. After we boarded."

I look at the phone. Then at him. "I didn't see any of this."

"I know," he says. "You had notifications off."

I did. I always turn them off on layovers — a decision I made two years ago after a particularly bad comment thread ruined a perfectly good Singapore morning. Jan knew this. Jan follows my channel. Jan saw the first question while we were at Camps Bay. By the time it became this, I was behind the flight-deck door and he was alone in 1A with no way to tell me.

"You waited," I say.

"You were flying," he says. "And then you landed and I was here."

I look at the phone again.

so he was lying to her the whole time

cheating confirmed

Jan Novak, works in finance in Amsterdam

They found his name. They found his name and they've decided what he is — the reason something broke, the thing that explains the breakup, the person Patrick left Maya for. Every single part of that is wrong and none of them know it and they are not asking.

I look up from the phone. Jan is watching me. His face is steady, the composed version, the one that takes effort, but there is something underneath it that he is not quite managing to contain. He has read all of this. He has stood here at arrivals holding this phone and watched me read it.

"Jan," I say.

"I know," he says. His voice is even. His jaw is not entirely.

"This isn't—" I stop. I look at the phone, at his name in the comments, at the story they've decided about him. "What they're saying about you. None of it is…”

"I know," he says again. Quietly. He looks at me with the full attention, not asking for anything, not managing anything, just present. "I'm not…I’m fine, Patrick."

I look at him. At the particular version of Jan being fine, which I have come to understand is not the same as Jan being unaffected. He has read all of this. He waited until I landed to tell me, because there was nothing I could do behind the flight-deck door except sit with it, and he was not willing to give me that.