She put the handbag on her lap, both hands on it, and then took the phone out of it and woke the screen and the deck came up where she had left it, slide nineteen, a map of the Florida coast with eleven blue dots. She crossed her ankles. The leather was cool through the skirt. Through the window beside her she could see the Meridian building and, in the glass of its second floor, a reflection of the airplane she was sitting in, white and small, with the sun on it.
She had sat in this seat perhaps forty times. She knew the sounds of it. She knew the particular tone of the APU through the fuselage at this spot, two feet behind the flight-deck bulkhead, and she knew the sequence that would come: the before-start checklist, the door, the air-stair, the first engine spooling up on the right side with that rising whine and then the second, the push, the taxi. She had learned the sequence the way she had learned the nine pieces of paper, because she could not help it, and because it had always seemed to her a kind of discourtesy to own a thing and not know how it worked.
The flight-deck door was open. It was always open on the ground; Altitude's procedure. Through it she could see the right-hand seat and the back of a head with light brown hair — the first officer, young, she thought, from the shoulders — and a sliver of the left seat, a navy sleeve, a hand on a yoke that did not need a hand on it yet. Two men's voices. The one on the right was reading, flat and even, with the slight upward lift at the end of each item that pilots used.
"Parking brake."
"Set."
"Fuel quantity."
"Checked, thirty-one two."
"Beacon."
A pause. "Beacon's on."
She did not know the captain. She knew that. She had met Altitude's captains for this airplane in a hangar once, fourteen months ago, in a parka, with a clipboard, during the hydraulic thing — three or four of them in a row, a handshake each, names she had not kept because they had not kept hers; she had watched one of them in particular, a florid man with grey hair who had shaken her hand and looked past her toward the hangar door, waiting for someone else to come through it. She had not corrected him. She had watched what he did next, which was to ask the mechanic a question about the owner's preferences, in her hearing, in the third person.
She had made a note. She had not done anything with the note. There had been a great many notes that year.
"Flight controls."
"Checked."
She scrolled to slide twenty-three. Deal structure: $212 million, $160 cash at close, the rest in a two-year earnout tied to occupancy. She knew it. She looked at it anyway, the way her mother looked at the ramp through the glass without seeing it, because her mind was somewhere else and the slide gave her hands something to do.
It was on her father. It was often on her father in this seat, on the ground, waiting. He had never flown. Not once. Nineteen years at a port where the whole world came through in steel boxes, and he had never been higher than the top of a crane, and he had told her once, at the kitchen table, that he did not need to; he could tell you where everything in the world was going by what was on the pier. She had asked him, at thirteen, whether he would ever want to go up in a plane. He had thought about it with the seriousness he gave everything.
"If somebody I trusted was flying it," he said.
She had never known what to do with that. She thought about it now, with the sun on the carpet and the APU in her teeth, and she thought that she trusted the airplane and she trusted Danielle, and that she had never been given a reason to trust or not trust the men in the flight deck because she had never been given the chance to know them, and that this was something she might change, and that the note from the hangar was fourteen months old.
"Before-start checklist complete to the line," the first officer said.
Nobody answered him.
She heard the sound of a seat harness being unbuckled — a metal click, then the slither of webbing — and the creak of a man standing up in a space that was not built for standing up. The sliver of navy sleeve went away from the left seat. In the galley, a knife stopped.
One set of footsteps came back.
They were not hurried. They were heavy and even, the footsteps of a man who had walked this aisle hundreds of times and did not have to think about where the carpet changed to the hard panel at the galley threshold. Three steps. Four. She did not look up right away. She had learned, in rooms on the thirty-first floor and in hangars and in a county clerk's office, that there was information in the second before you looked up, in the quality of the approach, in what someone did with their hands when they thought you weren't yet watching. She kept her eyes on slide twenty-three and her hands on the handbag and she listened to the footsteps stop beside her seat, close, closer than a crew member stopped to ask whether you wanted water.
He was breathing through his nose.
She raised her head.
He was fifty-something, florid, his grey hair thin and combed back from a forehead that had gone shiny, the four stripes on his cuffs bright against the navy, the black tie knotted tight at a collar that was a half-size too small. It was the man from the hangar. She knew him immediately and he did not know her at all; she could see that in the first half-second, could see that his eyes had gone over her and come back without finding anything they recognized, had gone to the seat and the handbag and the suit and the hair and the phone, and added them up, and arrived somewhere.
And she saw where he had arrived. That was the thing. It was all already there in his face before his mouth opened, the whole conclusion, the whole short story he had told himself between the left seat and this one: who she was and who she wasn't and where she belonged and whose seat this was, and what he was going to do about it, and how it was going to feel to do it. His jaw was set. His color was up. His right hand was coming off his hip. He had decided. Whatever he was about to say, he had already said it to himself, and it had already been true to him for longer than the four steps it took to get here, and she understood, looking at him, that nothing she had done in her life or could do in the next second would be admitted as evidence.
She did not move her hands. Her mother, forty feet behind her, had just turned a page.
He opened his mouth. The duty-time clock on the crew room wall said 11:00, and Gerald Pruitt had already been awake for seven hours of it.