"Daniel Cross."
"Mr. Cross." A woman's voice, crisp, unhurried, with the particular authority of someone who never needed to raise it. "This is Diane Frost. Coastal Airways."
Daniel closed his eyes. "Ms. Frost. I was expecting your call."
"Were you." A pause. "Then you won't be surprised when I say: we need to talk about your little incident."
Chapter Five
Claire
The apartment was too quiet at 10:30 in the morning. That was the first thing Claire Donovan noticed, standing in her own kitchen with her uniform still on and nowhere to be. No television. No Noah asking for a second breakfast. Just the refrigerator humming and the upstairs neighbor's baby crying through the ceiling, and the clock on the microwave blinking 10:30 like an accusation.
She had been sent home. Suspended without pay, pending review. The words sat in her stomach like something she had swallowed by mistake.
Noah was at school. He had asked that morning, mouth full of toast, why she wasn't leaving for work, and she had said, "Mommy has a day off," which was the kind of lie you told an eight-year-old when the truth was too big for the kitchen table. He had accepted it the way he accepted most things β with a small nod, already halfway back to his cereal. She wondered how long "a day off" could stretch before he started asking better questions.
The rent was due in nine days. She did the math standing at the counter, the way she did everything now β in her head, fast, the way the scorecards had trained her. Two weeks without pay, maybe more. The number at the end of the math was red. She closed her eyes and opened them again, and the number was still red.
Her phone had been buzzing since the terminal. Texts from coworkers: are you okay / what happened / they say the guy was the CEO. One from her supervisor: Do not talk to press. Refer all inquiries to corporate. And one from a number she didn't recognize, which she deleted without reading because she knew what it would say. Somebody had filmed it. Of course somebody had filmed it. There was always somebody filming.
She sat down at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands, and for the first time since yesterday morning, she let herself remember it properly β not the OMEGA banner, not the CEO, but the part before. The old woman on the floor with her suitcase. The boy and his expired ID. The woman with the hearing aids, asking her to slow down, and Claire waving her away like she was shooing a fly.
And the man in the gray jacket. His ticket. The sound it made tearing.
That was the part she couldn't get past. Everything else she could explain to herself β the line was long, the system was slow, she was on her sixth double shift in two weeks and her feet had hurt since dawn. But the ticket. She had torn a man's ticket in half, and then in half again, and dropped it in the trash, and said β God, what had she said? Now you don't have a ticket. She could still hear her own voice saying it, bright and vicious, and she felt sick.
She hadn't always been this person. That was the worst of it. Six years ago she had finished top of her training class β top, her instructor had shaken her hand β and she had meant it, all of it, the smile and the patience and the thing they taught you on day one about every passenger being somebody's whole world. She remembered a woman once, terrified of flying, crying at the counter before a red-eye to see her mother in the hospital β and Claire had walked her all the way to the gate herself, on her break, holding her elbow. The woman had sent a thank-you card. Claire had kept it in her locker for a year. Then came the scorecards. Then the handling-time targets, four minutes and twelve seconds, trending down. Then a supervisor β not Kline, the one before him β who had put a hand on her shoulder and said, "Claire, sweetheart, keep the line moving and nobody gets hurt." She had kept the line moving. She had gotten very good at it. Somewhere along the way, the line had started moving her.
At noon she made herself eat half a sandwich and called the daycare to confirm Noah's pickup. The woman on the phone asked, bright as a bell, "Everything okay, hon? You sound tired," and Claire almost told her β almost said the whole thing out loud to a stranger, just to hear how it sounded. "Just a day off," she said instead. At one she sat on the couch and stared at the wall. At two she opened her laptop and typed her own name into a search bar, and wished immediately that she hadn't. Ticket-tearing agent. Her name, her face from the company directory, in a comment section with four thousand replies. She closed the laptop.
At three-fifteen she was folding Noah's laundry β his small t-shirts, his socks with the dinosaurs β when she heard it: the sound of the ticket tearing, again, in her head. She pressed a warm shirt to her face and cried, quietly, so the neighbor's baby wouldn't hear.
The knock came at 4:40. Three hard raps, union-knock, the kind that meant business.
Claire wiped her face, checked the peephole, and opened the door to Tony Marone β fifty-five, broad as a doorway, the union steward for Terminal Four, holding his cap in his hands like a man at a funeral.
"Tony," she said. "I β come in β"
He didn't move. He looked at her β really looked, the red eyes, the uniform she hadn't changed out of β and his expression did something complicated.
"Claire," he said. "You don't talk to anyone without me. Not the company, not the press, not your supervisor, nobody. You got that?"