Gerald Pierce was older. That was the first true thing, and she registered it without triumph and without softening it. His silver-streaked dark hair had finished the journey to silver. The navy pinstripe suit of memory was gone; in its place, a plain dark jacket, open at the collar, the clothes of a man no longer dressing for a room he intended to own. The tablet with the financial news, which in her memory had been raised like a shield, was nowhere to be seen. He carried a paperback with a cracked spine, and he carried it the way she did, by the cover, pages inward.
He was looking for his row with the mild, squinting concentration of a man whose eyesight, too, had been revised by the years. He found it. He found her.
The recognition arrived in him the way it had arrived in her: not as shock, but as confirmation of something the body had already decided. He stopped in the aisle, one hand on the headrest of 2B, and the old tension — she felt it distinctly, in her shoulders, in her jaw — rose up between them out of pure habit, like heat off a runway. It had nowhere to go. The cabin was calm. The seat beside her was his, and the seat she sat in was hers, and both facts were so ordinary, so thoroughly documented by two unremarkable boarding passes, that the tension stood there for a moment with nothing to attach itself to, and began, visibly, to die.
Gerald Pierce smiled first.
It was not the smile she remembered from news photographs after the settlement, the careful, advised smile of a man issuing a public written statement and resigning a council chairmanship and beginning an ethics and conduct programme under the eyes of his own board. It was smaller than that, and older, and it reached him gradually, as if he were deciding, in real time, that smiling was the honest response and then permitting himself to have it.
"Imani Brooks," he said.
"Mr. Pierce," she said, and then, because the years had earned them both a revision and she was an engineer who believed revisions should be logged: "Gerald."
His smile widened at that, just slightly, with something in it that might have been gratitude and might simply have been relief at being addressed as a person rather than as a headline.
"May I?" he said, gesturing at 2B, and the absurdity and the rightness of the question landed on them at the same time. He was asking. Years ago a whole aircraft had held its departure because a man had not asked, and because other men, in offices, had arranged things in his name without asking anyone at all. Now he stood in a narrowing aisle with a paperback in his hand and asked permission to sit in the seat that was unambiguously his own.
"It's your seat," she said. "It says so on your pass. I checked the system's work myself, in a sense."
He laughed at that, a short, real sound that startled the passenger across the aisle out of her magazine. He stowed his jacket with the care of a man who had learned, late, to be careful with other people's space, and eased himself into 2B, and fastened his belt, and set the paperback on his knee without opening it.
For a moment neither of them spoke. It was not an uncomfortable silence. Imani had known uncomfortable silences; she had sat through a famous one, at a gate, while officials came down an aisle toward her. This silence had a different texture. It was the silence of two people consulting, privately, the same memory, from opposite ends of it.
"I read about the platform," he said at last. "The launch. Seattle, the announcement said. I wondered if it was you. Then I saw your name, and I stopped wondering."
"You follow audit infrastructure news," she said. "That's a late hobby."
"I follow one story in it," he said. "I have followed it, in its way, since a morning I don't expect either of us will ever entirely stop following it." He turned the paperback over once, in his hands. "I booked this flight to see my granddaughter. She is seven. She has opinions of a strength I recognize, regrettably, as hereditary." A pause. "I did not know you would be on it. I want that on the record, since records are — " He stopped, and shook his head at himself. "Since they matter. It seemed right to say so."
"It is on the record," she said, and gentled it with a small smile of her own. "Gerald, I believe you. Sit tight. It's a good flight, this one."
She had said something like that to him once before, in another life, in this same configuration of seats, and she heard the echo complete itself as she spoke. Sit tight, Mr. Pierce. Facts are on their way. The facts had come. They had come at 06:52 AM, written in a ledger, and they had rearranged three lives and an airline, and now here the two of them were again, arranged by an indifferent booking system into the same two chairs, with nothing left to dispute except, perhaps, what to say to each other for the next four hours.
Before either of them could decide, the cabin lights shifted, the door closed with its solid, final note, and the public address system woke above their heads with the small chime Imani had loved, obscurely, since childhood.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. From the flight deck, this is your captain."
The voice was older too — slower, warmer, worn smooth at the edges like a handrail in a much-used house — and Imani knew it before the name came, knew it in the same place she had known Gerald's walk.
"My name is Robert Callaway — most crews call me Rob — and it is my privilege to take you from Atlanta to Seattle this morning on Flight 64."
Beside her, Gerald went very still.
"Some of you may have heard," Captain Robert "Rob" Callaway continued, with the unhurried ease of a man reading the last page of a long book he had loved, "that this is a special flight for me. After thirty-eight years, this will be my farewell flight before retirement. I could not have chosen a better route, or a better morning, to say goodbye on."
In seat 2A, Imani looked at the man in 2B. In seat 2B, the man looked back.
"Well," Gerald Pierce said quietly. "Facts are on their way, indeed."
Chapter 29 — At Cruising Altitude
They did not begin, once the aircraft had climbed and leveled, with the morning. Imani noticed that, and was grateful for it, and understood that Gerald noticed her gratitude and was, in his own way, grateful in return. Grown people, she had learned, did their hardest talking sideways, approaching the center of a thing the way aircraft approached a runway: in a long, descending series of smaller, honest adjustments.
They began with his granddaughter, who had opinions, and with Seattle, where she lived, and with the question of whether a seven-year-old could be taught to lose at cards with grace, a subject on which Gerald reported himself to be a reluctant and frequently defeated tutor.
"She beats me fairly," he said. "I feel it is important to be precise about that. Fairly."
"Precision suits you," Imani said.
"It came expensively," he said, without self-pity, and she respected the sentence for carrying its weight without asking her to carry any of it.