"No," Devereux said. "Stop. I asked the firm to confirm my booking. I did not ask anyone to confirm a different seat than my booking."
Another pause. Longer.
"Look after me," he repeated, and now his voice had lost its smoothness at the edges. "Those are the words you used. Look after him on the Denver flight. To whom did you use those words?"
Across the aisle, the man in 1B had given up pretending to read. The woman in 1D held her phone in both hands and was not typing at all. Renee stood at the galley with her arms folded, not intervening, because there was nothing to intervene in. A man was dismantling his own morning, one question at a time, in a voice he kept trying to lower and could not quite manage.
Sanaa felt an odd, unwelcome thing then, and she examined it the way she examined a tempting play that used up both her best tiles for forty points and left the board wide open for a disaster. She did not feel triumphant. She had expected, if the moment ever turned, to feel the clean lift she felt when an opponent's challenge failed and the word stayed. Instead she felt tired, and faintly embarrassed for everyone, including herself, for having to stand in an aisle in a terracotta-orange hoodie and black jeans and scuffed white sneakers while a grown man learned something over the phone.
Devereux said, "Colin Mercer."
He said the name as if he were reading it back to be sure he had heard it. Then he said it again, differently. "Colin Mercer told you the account mattered to him personally. And you — " He broke off. "Did Mercer say the seat was available? Did he say whose seat — "
The answer to that one must have been longer, because Devereux closed his eyes.
Sanaa looked down at her word book. The cover was battered at the corners from being carried in and out of school gyms and hotel ballrooms and airport terminals exactly like this one. She had written her name inside the front cover when she was eleven, in the same small handwriting she used for everything that mattered. SANAA OSEI — IF LOST, PLEASE RETURN TO TABLE. She had never lost it. She had never lost the scorebook either. Some things you kept track of yourself because the keeping was the discipline.
When she looked up again, Devereux had ended the call without saying goodbye. Or the call had ended around him. His phone rested on the armrest, screen lit, and he stared at it as if it had become a document he did not recognize his own signature on.
"Mr. Devereux," the older official said gently. He had come back down the aisle with a printed sheet in his hand that he did not show to anyone. "Sir, we're going to need — "
"My firm," Devereux said, "asked this airline to look after me." He said it without looking at the official. He said it like a sentence he was testing for whether it could possibly be true in the world where he also existed inside it. "My people used — I believe 'seating preference' was the phrase. On this flight. This morning. I did not know there was a child attached to the preference."
Child. Sanaa's grip tightened on her book.
She was fourteen. At the championship she would sit across from seventeen-year-olds who drove themselves to tournaments and she would be expected — she would expect herself — to hold a board for four hours without flinching. But standing here, she understood that child was not an insult exactly. It was the first true thing he had found to call her, because before this phone call she had only been an obstruction in a seat he wanted, and obstructions do not have ages or names or fathers or reasons to be on an airplane.
He turned his head then.
It was a small movement, and in the held, breathless cabin it felt enormous. Edmund Devereux, in his navy three-piece suit, with his silk pocket square still perfect and his fountain pen still clipped in place, looked at Sanaa directly for the first time since he had told her — told the aisle, told the room, told anyone but her — that she could have the aisle and lose nothing.
His eyes went to the backpack. To the Scrabble tile keychain. To the word book in her arms, and whatever a man like that understood about Scrabble, he understood at least that the book was not a prop and the girl was not a mistake in his itinerary.
"Miss Osei," he said, very quietly.
Sanaa did not answer yet. She was not being rude. She was listening for what would come next, because a player's next word tells you more than their last one, and she could see, plain as an open rack left carelessly turned toward her, that he had no next word ready.
For the first time since boarding, Edmund Devereux was not wondering how to keep the seat. He was wondering — she could see it arrive, and she could see it frighten him — what exactly had been done in his name.
Chapter 9 — Wheels Up, Eventually
Sanaa got her seat the way she had gotten most things she was proud of: not with a speech, but with an official piece of paper arriving at the right moment and being read aloud by someone whose job was to read it exactly.
It happened in pieces. First the tablet man went forward again. Then a new voice joined the group at the flight deck door — a woman on a speaker, crisp and unhurried, whom the older official addressed as Ms. Grant. Sanaa only caught her own name twice and a time — 06:41 AM — repeated like a move being entered into a record, square by square. Then Captain Whitaker nodded once, decisively, the way a director nods when a challenge has been resolved and play will resume.
Renee came to Sanaa first.
"2A," she said, and smiled for real this time. "Let's get you settled, champion."
Sanaa did not ask how Renee knew to call her that. Maybe the record, the real record, said more than a seat number. Maybe flight attendants simply developed an instinct for which quiet passenger was travelling toward something that mattered. She shouldered past row one with her backpack held in front of her, careful, apologizing without words to knees and elbows, and stopped at row two.
Devereux stood up.