"There's something else," she said. "He gave me papers to carry because he said his briefcase was already checked. I thought they were travel documents and business agreements. I saw your name on one of them, but I didn't understand why it mattered."
She pulled out a manila folder that had been folded to fit beside her wallet. Across the top of the first page was the name of a company I had never heard before: Mar Azul Holdings LLC. Underneath it, in a paragraph headed Related-Party Authorization, was my full name, Valerie Bennett Carter, followed by a reference to a notarized property guaranty. A second page listed Ashley Monroe as an authorized representative of a design consultancy she owned.
"Why is my name on that?" I asked.
Ashley swallowed. "Ryan said you were helping him reorganize the company before the divorce. He said you agreed to keep an investment separate from your settlement. I didn't know whether that was normal."
"Have you ever met a lawyer who represented me?"
"No."
"Have you ever seen me sign any of this?"
She shook her head. Her eyes moved to the papers, and then to the opening in the curtain where Ryan could still be heard speaking with another flight attendant. "He told me he had everything taken care of," she whispered. "I thought he meant the divorce."
The printed name on the document seemed to lift off the paper. It was not only Ryan's dishonesty about our marriage. He had placed my identity inside a financial transaction involving his mistress and had persuaded her to carry the documents across an international border. Whether Ashley was a participant or another person being used, I did not yet know. The important thing was that my signature appeared where it had no right to be.
"Please don't give these back to Ryan," I said. "Tell the investigating officers exactly where you got them."
Ashley hesitated. "Am I in trouble?"
"I don't know. That's for people with the evidence to determine. But if you weren't involved, hiding the documents won't help you."
Denise motioned for Ashley to return to her seat. As she turned away, the younger woman stopped and looked at me again. "I thought I was going on an anniversary trip with a divorced man," she said, her voice flat with disbelief. "I never thought I'd be sitting on an airplane holding papers with his wife's name on them."
"Neither did I," I answered.
She disappeared behind the curtain. I had expected to hate her. In that moment I mainly wanted her to tell the truth, whatever the truth turned out to be. It was an unfamiliar desire, colder than anger and much more useful.
The aircraft remained at the gate. Captain Ellis made a brief announcement about a delay while ground operations completed additional coordination. Priya kept the door open and spoke quietly with two airport police officers who had arrived on the jet bridge, one woman and one man wearing dark uniforms and identification badges. Behind them stood a plainclothes detective carrying a thin folder.