"Thank you," Sanaa said, and meant more by it than the agent could be expected to know.
She walked down the jet bridge with the light coming through its seams, and stepped through the aircraft door, and turned toward the front cabin.
Her seat, booked without any fuss at all, was 2A.
Chapter 28 — 2B
2A was a window seat. That, too, she had chosen on purpose, months of habit compressed into a single click at the time of booking, and standing in the aisle of the First Class cabin she felt the simple, disproportionate pleasure of an ordinary preference honoured.
The cabin was quiet in the way First Class cabins were quiet before departure: low voices, the soft percussion of overhead bins, the unhurried movements of people who had paid, in currency or in loyalty, not to rush. Sanaa stowed her case, kept her folder, and sat down. The seat was wider than the one she remembered, or she was better at judging seats now, or — the explanation she liked best — fourteen-year-olds experience everything at a scale adults cannot recover. She put her bag where a cream canvas backpack had once gone. The brass tile knocked once, gently, against the frame, and settled.
She opened the summit programme on her lap without reading it, and watched the door.
It was not expectation. She told herself that firmly. Flight 208 was a scheduled Larkspur Air service, flown every day by different crews and different passengers, and the population of Denver contained multitudes who might legitimately occupy any seat in this cabin. Her presence in 2A was the only deliberate echo. She had not checked who was in 2B. Investigators knew better than to go looking for patterns the evidence had not offered.
Then an older man paused at the front of the cabin, thanked the flight attendant by the door with an old-fashioned courtesy, and turned toward row 2.
He was greyer, and slower, and the expensive certainty had gone out of his posture in a way she recognised from other men she had met late in proceedings: the shoulders lower, the movements more considered, as if life had taught him the cost of taking up too much room. His suit was still excellent. His face, in profile, settling his boarding pass into a book, was unmistakable.
Edmund Devereux took seat 2B.
For a moment, Sanaa did nothing that anyone watching would have noticed. Her hand rested on the programme. Her breathing continued. But inside the small, private chamber of her attention, the past rearranged itself with the speed of a board being re-read after a challenge. She remembered his voice before she remembered anything else — its training, its reach, how it had filled the cabin years ago with the assumption that volume and standing were forms of evidence. She remembered being fourteen and understanding, with a clarity that had never left her, that she would not win by matching him. She would win by being recorded.
He set his bag down. He sat. He fastened nothing yet, because they were still boarding, and he placed his book on his knee with the pass inside it, and he glanced, as passengers do, toward the person with whom he would share an armrest and several hours.
Recognition, when it came, did not arrive as shock. She saw it move through him the way she had seen it move through respondents in interview rooms when a document was placed on the table: first the flicker, then the calculation, then the slower, honest arrival of memory. His eyes went to her face, and then — she could not help noticing it, and forgave him for it instantly — to the keychain on her bag, the brass tile, the letter S.
"Ms. Osei," he said.
"Mr. Devereux," she said.
The old tension was there. She would not pretend otherwise, and neither, to his credit, did he. It lived for a beat in the narrow space of the armrest, in the memory of a morning when he had looked at a child in a terracotta-orange hoodie and decided that the seat she occupied must be an error that his importance could correct. It lived in everything the investigation afterwards had had to set in order. She felt fourteen somewhere beneath the adult she had become, and she let the feeling be there without letting it steer.
He was the one who broke it, and he broke it the right way.
He smiled first.
It was not the smile of a man performing cordiality for a cabin. It was smaller than that, and rueful, and it reached his eyes only after a visible decision. "I believe," he said, "that this is my seat. I checked twice. I have become a man who checks." A pause, self-deprecating, careful. "I am told the record is generally reliable on these questions."
Something unknotted in Sanaa's chest that she had not known was knotted.
"It generally is," she said, and smiled back. "2B. It was always 2B."
"Yes," he said quietly. "It was." He extended his hand across the armrest — slowly, so that she could decline it — and she took it. His grip was dry and firm and brief. Years ago, after the mandatory professional-conduct programme, after the apology that had been written properly and in his own hand, they had parted with a handshake in very different circumstances. This one was easier. This one was just two travellers, in the seats the record said were theirs, acknowledging that the record had been right all along.
He asked, with genuine deference, whether she was travelling to Orlando for the anniversary — he had seen the programme on her lap — and she told him about the summit, and the keynote, and watched him take in what she had become without surprise, as if some part of him had always assumed the girl who would not be moved would grow into a woman professionally immovable on other people's behalf.
"You built it out of that morning," he said. It was not quite a question.
"I built it out of what that morning proved," she said.
He nodded, and was about to say more, when the cabin speakers chimed, and both of them, by reflex, looked up.
The captain's voice came over the PA — warm, unhurried, unmistakable after all these years — and announced that this was Dana Whitaker, and that this was her farewell flight.
Chapter 29 — At Cruising Altitude
Captain Whitaker's announcement did what Sanaa had rarely heard a public-address announcement do: it changed the temperature of a cabin.