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said, though he’d messed up the pronunciation of the city name.
    Egan reached into the pouch before his knees and extracted a paperback travel guide to Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro. “We’re going to be plane buddies all the way, then.”
    I raised my brows. “Really? What are you going out there for?”
    â€œUm. Business.” A glance downward indicated the white shirt beneath his jacket. “I’m in security systems.”
    â€œUh…?”
    â€œI.T., mostly. For a bank.”
    â€œThat sounds…” I got stuck for a polite adjective.
    â€œAwful, right?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œBut at least I get to see a new country in my lunch breaks.” He fished inside his jacket. “Perhaps you can help me… This is the place I’m staying at.” He showed me a business card printed in Montenegrin script. “I can’tactually pronounce the words for the taxi driver at the airport. It’s like half the vowels are missing. And there are all these little marks…”
    Smiling, I read the address, which was full of accented letters that didn’t exist in the American alphabet, and then I read it out for him, line by line. He repeated it after me until he was happy. “So that’s a TS not a C ?”
    â€œYep. And that one sounds like a J even though it looks like a D. ”
    â€œAh grand. I can see this is going to be fun. Still, at least it’s not in Cyrillic—that was what I was really scared of.”
    â€œYou’ll still find the Cyrillic alphabet in churches. But not out in the streets these days. Things are changing.” That’s what I’d been told, anyway. It’d been five long years since I’d seen for myself. The reminder made me uncomfortable. “Are you from Newfoundland, by any chance?” I asked, changing the subject. I’d had a Newfie roommate at college.
    Egan shook his head. “Good guess, but no, I’m not. My mother’s Irish—that’s the accent you’re hearing. American father, though.” He smiled self-deprecatingly. “Dual nationality.”
    â€œSo which country do you live in?”
    â€œUh, well, I grew up in Ireland. But I’ve been based in the States since. I try to travel on whichever passport gets the friendly reception at a given national border.” He rolled his eyes. “Which, when I’m working in England, is neither.”
    We spent some of the rest of the trip looking through his tourist book, and I taught him a few helpful phrases and told him what useful details I could remember about my native country—which was sadly little, when it came down to it, even though Montenegro is only about the size of Connecticut and has less than a fifth of the population. A tiny place, relative to the States, but I’d experienced firsthand only my own small village, a few summer visits to Žabljac—which wasn’t that much bigger—and that one trip to the capital Podgorica when I’d been put on the plane out to Boston. Everything else was hearsay, acquired from Father. But I liked talking to Egan; it took my mind off my own anxieties. And it was easy. He wasn’t pushy or weird or anything. We stopped talking only when they dimmed the cabin lights to encourage us all to sleep. Vera never came back from business class, but I didn’t mind at all.
    When we touched down in Zurich we walked through to the transferlounge together. Egan wheeled Vera’s suitcase for her, which delighted my cousin even though it didn’t stop her throwing me sharp little glances of warning.
    We compared tickets for the flight onward, but this time we weren’t sitting anywhere near each other. I shrugged and smiled, but felt a real pang of disappointment.
    â€œHere,” he told me, as the call for boarding came over the public address system and we rose, a little wearily, to face the next leg of the journey. Whipping