Zara held his gaze. She did not smile. She did not look down.
He looked away first.
Chapter 9: Wheels Up, Eventually
The ledger took another hour, most of which Zara spent not knowing what was happening.
That was the hardest part to explain later, and she tried, to herself, while it was still happening, so she would have it straight: how the biggest morning of her life could also be so much sitting. Officials moving between the cockpit and the gate. Marlene Brooks on and off the plane twice. Daniel Reyes stepping into the jet bridge with his team and not coming back for a long time β and then coming back alone, saying something to Captain Hart at the door that made the captain close her eyes for one second, with relief or exhaustion, before she nodded.
Then, movement. Not answers. Movement.
A flight attendant stopped at Zara's borrowed seat and crouched, which put her eyes level with Zara's. "Miss Coleman," she said β Miss Coleman, not sweetheart, and Zara understood that some line had been crossed on paper somewhere and she had been promoted in the airline's mouth from a problem to a person. "We're going to seat you now. In Two-A. If you're ready."
"I'm ready," Zara said, and her voice came out steady, which she was proud of for the entire walk up the aisle.
The cabin watched her go. She felt it, every eye, and chose a point to look at β the window of 2A, daylight in it, her daylight β and walked to it with her red bag bumping softly against her leg. Richard Bennett stood to let her in. He stood in the aisle and stepped back a full step beyond what was necessary, holding his briefcase against his chest like a shield or an offering, and did not speak, and did not quite look at her, and sat down in 2B only after she was settled, as if the order of these things might matter to somebody keeping a record.
Somebody, she thought, is keeping a record of everything now.
She put her bag under the seat in front of her. She buckled her belt. She took out her phone to screenshot the time β 11:47, more than three hours after they should have left, a whole morning spent at a gate in New York β and texted her father: In 2A. Taking off soon. I'm okay. His reply arrived before she could put the phone away, three words she read twice. Proud of you. Then a second text: Call me when you land. Not before. Rest.
Captain Hart's voice came over the cabin, warm and frayed at the edges. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain. I want to thank you for your patience this morning, and I want to apologize for the delay. We are cleared to push back. Flight Two-Twelve to London, we'll have you there this evening, local time. Crew, prepare for departure."
The jet bridge pulled away. The plane began to roll, slow and then purposeful, past gates and tails and the long gray rivers of the taxiway, and Zara pressed her forehead almost to the window, which was cold, and watched New York arrange itself below the wing as they climbed β because they did climb, finally, the engines opening up into that deep rising roar, the ground letting go of them all at once in the way that never stopped feeling impossible. The city went quilted and silver. The coastline drew its bright edge. Then cloud, white and total, and above the cloud an afternoon that belonged to no country at all.
Beside her, separated by an armrest that might as well have been an ocean border, Richard Bennett did not speak.
He did not speak when the seatbelt sign chimed off. He did not speak when the crew came through with drinks, accepting water with a murmur so low Zara barely caught it, wrapping both hands around the glass. He worked, or performed working: laptop open, a document on the screen he scrolled and re-scrolled, his eyes moving over the same paragraph the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth. Twice his phone buzzed in his pocket and Zara saw his hand start toward it and stop. Whatever was waiting for him on the other side of this flight, he seemed in no hurry to meet it in front of her.
Zara did not speak either. It was not stubbornness. It was closer to what her father called answering in the right room β this cabin, at thirty-eight thousand feet, was not the room, and the silence between 2A and 2B had become its own kind of statement that neither of them seemed willing to ruin with the wrong sentence. She put in her earbuds with nothing playing, just for the small privacy of it. She did her breathing. She thought about the academy: a desk with her name on it, a debate hall, fourteen days of being a person she hadn't met yet. She thought about Marlene Brooks's folded piece of paper. She thought, once, about Martin Vale, a name attached to no face, a man somewhere in an office who at 6:12 in the morning had reached into a computer and moved her thirty rows back as easily as dragging a file β and she made herself think about the debate hall again instead. Anger would keep. It was patient that way; it didn't need her to feed it over the Atlantic.
Hours went by in the strange suspended arithmetic of long flights. A meal she half ate. A movie she didn't watch. Sleep that came in pieces and left her each time briefly unsure where she was, until the window reminded her.
And then, somewhere past the halfway darkness, the light began to change.
It came up under the cloud deck first, a thinning, a gilding at the edges, and then the plane descended through it in stages and the world below went green and gray and gold β England, in late light, field over field, roads like stitching, a river taking the sun and throwing it back. London light, Zara thought, and felt absurdly like crying at the ordinariness of it, the simple kept promise of it: she had a window seat, and through it, exactly as the brochure had promised a girl who had never left the country, a new city was arriving to meet her.
Her phone, in airplane mode, showed a row of notifications queued and waiting for a signal like runners at a line. Group chat. Her counselor. Her father, nothing since rest. She turned the phone face-down.