I shook my head. “No, no, that’s not it. Now I remember.” I gave his hand—which was gripping the armrest so tight his fingers carried a slight tremor—a few light pats and continued: “It’s Survivor. You are less likely to survive a plane crash than you are to get on Survivor. That’s it.”

“Can you, um—” He gulped. “—stop talking about plane crashes?”

If I seriously wanted to mess with him, I would have told him how my parents had died in a plane crash eleven years earlier when my father’s company jet, which was similar to this one, had crashed into the Sierra Nevadas.

I let out a light laugh. “Sorry, I was just messing with you.”

I have a weird sense of humor. And it gets even weirder when I’m stressed. And flying on a jet to Bolivia to track down the love of my life in the middle of the Amazon jungle had my stress level at Platinum Select.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Andy Depree.”

I introduced myself.

There was a rabbit’s foot, a tan rock, and a folded piece of yellow paper on the table in front of Andy and I asked, “What’s with the garage sale?”

The corners of his mouth turned up into the faintest of smiles, and he said, “Good-luck charms.”

“Ah.” I nodded at his lime-green shirt—which on closer examination read i paused my game to be here—and said, “And let me guess, that’s your lucky flying shirt?”

“How’d you know?”

“I don’t think anyone would wear a shirt like that voluntarily.”

He looked down at his shirt then back up. “It’s not that bad.”

I let this go and asked, “What makes it lucky?”

“Every time I’ve flown in it, we haven’t crashed.”

“Wow. Such sorcery.”

He half laughed, then asked, “I’m guessing you don’t have many good-luck charms of your own.”

After I was attacked by a pack of wolves, one of the rangers sent me a tooth from one of the wolves that had been killed. It was in a box somewhere in Seattle next to the bullet they’d removed from my left shoulder. But I thought of these less as good-luck charms and more as friendly reminders to buy additional life insurance.

“I’m not superstitious,” I said, then without planning it, I added a line from The Office: “But I am a little stitious.”

He laughed. “Michael Scott!”

In my fit of depression two years earlier, I’d binged all nine seasons in one week.

“I actually auditioned to be on that show,” Andy said.

“No kidding?”

“Yeah, I think it was season three or something. I auditioned to be their IT guy.”

“How did you not get the part?” Andy was all IT guy.

“I got nervous. Muffed my lines. Wasn’t the first time.”