United Airlines flight 5742 circled above La Guardia airport in New York and prepared for its final descent.
Derek Martin checked his watch, noting that they would be right on time. As he looked out of the window he marveled at the sight of New York, his favorite city in the entire world, and once again felt relieved that he had made it back home tonight. He had come so close to missing his plane, and had only just made it with seconds to spare.
After his walk along the Potomac River, he caught a cab over to George Town, and walked into Martin's Tavern just in time for his 6.30 p.m. reservation, made on his iPhone earlier that morning.
He had first come to Martin's Tavern when he was a post-grad student, visiting Washington to give a speech about atmospheric physics. It was at the conference that he had met Kate Schwartz, although at that time her name had been Kate Cohen.
She was a young and beautiful student studying physics at Penn State, fascinated by Atmospheric Physics, and after his speech, also fascinated by Derek.
She had waited for him after his speech had ended, and approached with a few questions. The moment Derek had seen her, he had fallen in love.
She was slightly taller than he was, had glossy, black hair, beautiful piercing blue eyes, was slim and had a fantastic smile.
They say that you only ever truly fall in love once in your life. Derek believed that this was true. It had happened to him then and there, and never again.
His had been the last speech of the day, and as the hall had emptied out, and the cleaners had come to prepare the venue for the next day's presentations, Derek and Kate had sat on some seats at the back of the hall and talked.
He had answered all of her questions, and then asked a few of his own, starting with: "Would you like to continue this conversation over dinner?"
The answer had been 'yes'.
Leaving the hotel, they had walked and walked, eventually ending up in Georgetown, where Kate had suggested they go for a steak at Martin's Tavern. She wanted to show him the famous 'Rumble Seat', a booth for one person where President John F. Kennedy frequently used to sit and eat Sunday breakfast.
The Rumble Seat was just inside the door on the right hand side. When they visited, it was the only seat free in the whole house: using her charm and incredible smile, Kate had persuaded the manager to let them both sit there, squeezed tightly together. Derek had not objected.
"Over there," he could remember Kate pointing to another booth beside the window a few booths away, "...Is where JFK proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier and asked her to become the future wife of the 35th President of the United States!"
Derek had watched her as she spoke, noticing the twinkle in her eye, the freckles on her cheeks, and the way she raised one eyebrow before she laughed.
Only hours after he had met her for the first time, he put his hand on her thigh under the table, and kissed her gently on the cheek. She had stopped speaking, turned towards him, kissed him gently on his lips, and put her hand over his on her leg.
That night he had walked her back to her hotel room, and forgotten to leave. They had made love all night long, sleeping only briefly. Derek had an early morning flight, and had to rush away just after six o'clock to make it back to his hotel, collect his stuff and get out to the airport in time.
Unfortunately, he had made the flight. He had spent the next ten years wondering what would have happened, and how different life might have been if he had not made it and if he had been forced to spend another day in Washington, with Kate.
They were living on different sides of America, he in California, and she on the East Coast.
For six months they wrote to each other every week. Twice Derek flew to see her in Pennsylvania. It was whilst visiting her for the second time that Derek found out that Kate was Jewish. To him this was not a problem, and it did not affect the way he felt for her, but when Kate had told him this, she was sad.
From then on their relationship had gone downhill. Not because he loved her less, and also, Derek believed, not because her feelings for him had changed either. But in her last letter to him that year, she had explained that her parents, whom she loved with all her heart, were putting tremendous pressure on her to marry a 'good Jewish man'. Although she had been rebelling for most of her life, she knew that her parents were probably correct, and felt she had no choice but to stop seeing Derek. They had to find new lives without each other: "This has been a wonderful, wonderful dream, but now I have to wake up, and live the life that God and my family expect of me."
The next three months had been the worst in Derek's life. His heart had been broken. He tried to contact Kate, but couldn't. She had left Pennsylvania.
Years later, he had managed to track her down on LinkedIn. Her pictures showed that she was still as beautiful as ever, even more so, but the name beside her photograph and on her profile said Kate Schwartz, not Stone, as it used to be. She had been married for a year, to a stockbroker from New York.
She was smiling in her photograph.
Six months later, out of the blue, he had received a connection request from Kate, stating:- 'We've done business together', citing her time at Penn State for when they had met.
He had accepted the request, and she had mailed him a single sentence: "Please can we meet?"
They arranged to meet back in Washington, at Martin's in Georgetown. It was her idea. Perhaps she was hoping to rekindle memories from the past, or maybe it was innocent, and just because she liked the restaurant.
Derek thought it was the former.
They met, they hugged, they talked, and later that evening Derek had walked her back to her hotel room. And forgotten to leave.
Kate was desperately unhappy. She had married because she thought she was in love. Joshua was a good, kind man. A good Jewish man from a good family. And when they had met, Kate was actively looking for a good Jewish man from a good family. When she had eventually taken him to meet her parents, they had both loved him.
It was only after they were married that she realised that she had been swept away with the idea of the romance, rather than the romance itself.
And yet, she could not leave him. To do so would be to break her parents' hearts, and it would probably kill them. And Joshua was a good man! He provided security and warmth. If she left him, it would destroy him, and he did not deserve it. He had given her everything... yet sadly, in spite of how 'good' he was, the spark that had existed with Derek was sadly absent from her relationship with Joshua.
She was stifled, suffocating... and bored. But she couldn't bring herself to leave him. Surely this must be her fault? If only she could change, become a better wife...
Over the next two years, Derek and Kate had met several times: at conferences, on work-related business trips, and several times for weekends when Joshua was out of the country visiting business clients.
Whenever they met, they did their best to forget Kate's other life, and lived only for the moment, having fun, eating and drinking in romantic restaurants, and making love for hours on end. Until the time came to go home. Back to the real world.
Then one day, Kate said she could not do it anymore. The guilt was too much. She could no longer go behind Joshua's back anymore.
She ended it.
Kate joined NOAA and found new sources of excitement, and Joshua moved with her, opening up his own business near NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, so that Kate could be happy and close to her new job. He was a good man.
For a few years, Kate and Derek never spoke, until late last week, when Derek had started to finalize preparations for the project.
Whether or not it was fate, destiny, or pure coincidence, their lives had intersected again: Kate Schwartz was flying one of the Stormchasers that would look for Derek's Hunraken Vortex.
And because of him, she was now missing, dead or possibly transported trough time and space to only God himself knew where.
Flight 5742 touched down safely, the plane bumpin
g gently onto the runway as the pilot conducted a flawless landing.
It was then that Derek realised the hopelessness of it all: if Kate's airplane had flown through a Hunraken Vortex and had been transported back through time to before the twentieth century, how would they land the airplane without a runway?
They couldn't.