There is a moment on every jet bridge when the corridor belongs to nobody. You have left the terminal. You have not yet boarded. It is a threshold, a pause between one version of your journey and the next. In March 2023, on a bridge at Vienna International Airport, a woman tapped me on the shoulder in that pause and rearranged my understanding of chance.

“Are you Vince?” she asked. “I recognised the prescription sunglasses.”

Behind her stood a very tall man with the quiet composure of someone who has recently come through something enormous.

“I sat next to you on the plane from Turkey,” she said. “This is my husband. He is cancer free. And we have just come back from Mecca.”

In December 2022, I boarded a flight from Antalya to London Heathrow. A Pakistani woman had moved to the seat beside mine because her sister’s children were proving difficult further down the cabin. We did what strangers at thirty thousand feet sometimes do. We talked.

Her name was Areeja. Her story arrived the way that stories do at altitude, honestly, without rehearsal. Her husband was American. He had cancer. And there was a question suspended over their lives that no oncologist could answer: should she leave her home in East London and move to the United States, or should he cross the Atlantic to her? The geography of illness had imposed itself on the geography of love, and neither would yield.

She mentioned, almost as........

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