She kept the seat warm for thirty years. He never got off.
People assumed she was waiting. She wasn’t. She had simply decided that the 6:14 was hers — the window seat on the left, the view of the river disappearing into evening — and that she would not give these things up because someone was absent.
He had taken the seat once, years ago. He had said: the river looks different from this side.
She still thought of that sometimes. The river. The different.