"Thank you, Graham," Catherine said warmly. "You're a treasure."
She walked to row 2 and stood for a moment looking at the two seats. The cabin was beautiful, the way it was always beautiful, all cream leather and dark polished walnut and soft warm light from the ceiling panels. The window seat had a small privacy partition on the aisle side and a deep side ledge by the window with a reading lamp and a little bowl for a glass. Through the oval window she could see the gray morning, the wing of the next aircraft over, a ground crew in orange vests walking under it.
She put her tote bag on the ledge, folded her coat neatly into the overhead bin, and sat down in 2A. She crossed her legs. She took a small silk sleep mask and a hardcover novel she was not going to read out of the tote and arranged them on the ledge. She settled.
In the galley, Tessa leaned close to Graham and said something in a low voice.
"It's fine," Graham said quietly. "She always sits there."
"Her pass says 2C."
"I know what her pass says."
"So when the 2A passenger gets here..."
"When the 2A passenger gets here, we'll ask them nicely if they'd mind taking the aisle. It happens all the time. People don't care. Mrs. Ashworth cares." He glanced at Tessa. "She's flown with us for eleven years, Tess. She's one of the top forty Sovereigns in the system. You know what the inflight manager would say if she wrote in."
Tessa did not answer. She went back to the coffee service. But she looked down the aisle at the woman in 2A, and then at the empty seat beside her, and the expression on her face was one of someone who had seen this happen before and had not liked it then either.
Other passengers came on. The older couple from the lounge, who took 3A and 3C. A young man in a hoodie and very expensive sneakers who was talking to someone on his phone about a funding round and took 4D. The man in the tracksuit, who took 1F and put his headphones on. The woman with the hardcover book, who took 3F. A family of three who took the center seats in row 4. The cabin filled slowly, the way it always did, with the soft sounds of bins opening and closing, coats being folded, quiet greetings.
Catherine looked out the window. She was aware of her heart beating somewhat faster than it should. She told herself that it was the coffee. She told herself it was Olivia. She told herself that when the passenger for this seat arrived, he would be a businessman like the man in 1A, someone with headphones and a laptop who would glance at her and at his boarding pass and at Graham's apologetic smile and shrug and take the aisle, because people like that did not care where they sat as long as they could sleep. That was how it usually went. That was how it had always gone.
She picked up the inflight magazine from the seat pocket in front of her, because it was something to do with her hands. Horizons, it was called. The cover showed a beach somewhere in Portugal. She flipped through it without reading. Restaurant recommendations in Lisbon. A profile of a jazz club in Dublin. A crossword. On the last page, as always, a letter from the chief executive, with a small photograph in the corner.
She did not look at the photograph. She closed the magazine and put it back in the pocket and looked out the window again.
At 8:19, a woman in a cream suit stepped through the forward door of the aircraft, and Graham, who was speaking to the man in 1F about a pillow, turned and saw her and did not recognize her.
"Welcome aboard," he said, with a quick, polite smile, and his eyes went to her boarding pass folder, and then back to her face, and Naomi saw him begin to say something and then decide not to, and she saw his eyes flick, almost imperceptibly, toward row 2.
"Thank you," Naomi said.
She walked into the cabin.
* * *
The cabin was warmer than the jet bridge had been, and quieter. That was the first thing she noticed, as she always did. The Signature cabin had been designed to feel, the moment a passenger stepped into it, like a room rather than a tube, and the designers had done it mostly with light and sound. The ceiling panels gave off a soft, even wash of warm white, closer to the light of a good hotel lobby than to the hard fluorescent glare