“Ladies and gentlemen, because of congestion at JFK we are still awaiting clearance to depart. Your flight is delayed until further notice. Thank you for your patience.”

A collective groan rolled through Gate C11, followed by the rustle of phones lifted for another futile check of departure boards. Three hours of terminal limbo had already turned the waiting area into a makeshift camp: greasy take-out boxes balanced on roller bags, novels opened and abandoned, children orbiting power outlets. The choreography repeated in loops—snack, scroll, restroom, scroll, sip—until each traveler blurred into the next.

Except two.

At the far left of the windows, where grounded jets filled the view like silent rebukes, sat Charlie Mercer with a single backpack at his feet. Several rows behind him, a woman named Josephine Haire, dressed in an immaculate navy coat, sat equally motionless in her seat – both oblivious to the terminal’s ebb and flow.

—

Charlie Mercer, twenty-two, NYU junior in environmental engineering, stared past the glass as though watching a scene only he could see. Until forty-eight hours ago his life had neat edges—credit-bearing deadlines, cafeteria takeovers for free pizza, group-chat jokes that died after three emojis.

Then his mother died.

Two days later he lowered her casket into red Georgia clay, and the borders of his existence simply dissolved. He had not cried—could not explain why. Grief lay heavy inside him, mute and unsummoned, while the world outside kept asking for boarding passes and patience. So, Charlie sat, motionless amid the shuffle of the terminal, waiting for a plane back to New York and for a version of his life he already knew no longer waited for him there.

-

Josephine Haire, forty-two, a librarian at a small college in upstate New York, sat with her hands folded neatly in her lap, a pristine paper tissue tucked beneath them like a fragile keepsake. Thirty-six hours earlier, she had walked out of an adoption agency in Atlanta—another closed chapter in her long effort to invite a child into her life. She had wanted children for as long as she could remember—long before she ever thought seriously about marriage. Neither had come to pass. Mostly because of the hospital stays—frequent, unpredictable, and still without a diagnosis for the autoimmune condition that shadowed her adult life.

She had been deemed “unsuitable” to care for a child.

The word clung to her—sharp-edged, seared into her thoughts like a brand. She sat as still as she could, rigid with the kind of grief that feels too dangerous to touch, afraid that even the smallest movement might crack the fragile shell holding her together. The flight delay, though inconvenient for everyone else at Gate C11, was a small mercy to her—a temporary stall before returning to a life that now seemed to offer only silence and solitude she never asked for.

_

“Ladies and gentlemen, air traffic control at JFK has cleared us for departure. Boarding will begin in five minutes.”

A collective exhale rippled through the terminal—zippers zipped, wrappers crumpled, belongings gathered like pieces of time briefly misplaced. The machinery of motion reactivated all at once.

In that moment, both Charlie and Josephine knew they had to rise—had to rejoin a life neither of them had asked for. And so, with nothing else left to hold back, all they could do was cry.