of an ordinary airplane. The walls were lined with a padded fabric that absorbed the noise of the ground equipment outside. The floor was carpeted in a deep charcoal with a thin line of LED lighting running along each side of the aisle, guiding the eye forward toward the walnut-paneled bulkhead at the front, where the cockpit door sat flush with the paneling, finished in the same dark wood, so that unless a person knew it was there they might have taken it for a cabinet.
She had walked through this cabin perhaps fifty times. She had walked through it when it was a bare aluminum shell in a hangar in Hamburg, with wiring hanging from the ceiling and the old seats stacked on pallets outside. She had walked through it on the launch morning, with cameras following her. She had never walked through it like this, as a stranger with a boarding pass, and she found that it was a different room entirely.
The man in 1A had his eyes closed and his headphones on. The man in the tracksuit in 1F nodded to her as she passed, a brief, friendly nod, the kind that people who were often the only one of something in a room gave to each other without thinking. She nodded back. In 3A and 3C, the older couple were settling in, the husband fussing with the seat controls while his wife told him patiently to leave them alone. The woman with the hardcover book in 3F had already opened it and was reading with her glasses pushed down her nose. In row 4, a family was trying to get a small boy to stop pressing the button that opened and closed his privacy door. The young man in the hoodie in 4D was still on his phone, saying something about a valuation.
Naomi stopped beside row 2.
The window seat was occupied.
She had known it would be. She had known it since the lounge, since she had heard a woman in a teal jacket say that she had been flying in that seat for eleven years. She had known it when Graham's eyes had flicked toward row 2 at the door. And still, standing in the aisle with her boarding pass in her right hand, looking at the woman in the teal jacket sitting in 2A with her legs crossed and her coat folded in the bin above and her book and her sleep mask arranged on the ledge beside her, Naomi felt something tighten in her chest that she had not expected to feel. It was not anger. Not yet. It was something older and quieter than anger, a kind of tired recognition, the feeling of arriving somewhere and finding that someone had already decided you did not belong in it.
The woman was looking out the window. She had not looked up when Naomi stopped. She did not look up now.
Behind her, Naomi was aware of the galley. Graham had come back from 1F and was standing at the edge of the galley partition with a stack of folded hot towels on a tray, watching. The younger flight attendant, Tessa, was beside him. Neither of them moved.
Naomi took her boarding pass out of the walnut-colored folder. It was printed on heavy cream card stock, another detail she had approved, because she had thought that in an age of phone screens a paper pass for the premium cabin would feel like a small, solid courtesy. It said MORGAN/NAOMI MS in black type, and SIGNATURE, and under SEAT, in larger type than anything else on the card, 2A.
She held it out, not quite toward the woman, just far enough that it could be seen. Her blazer had come unbuttoned when she lifted her bag into the bin a moment before, and she did not button it again. The earrings swung once against her jaw and then were still.
"Excuse me," she said. "That's my seat?"
She heard the question in her own voice and was briefly annoyed by it. It was not a question. The card in her hand said 2A and the woman was in 2A. But it was the voice she had used all her life in situations like this, a voice she had learned before she could remember learning it, gentle and clear and a little uncertain at the end, a voice that left room for the other person to correct a mistake without losing face. It was a voice designed to keep things calm. Her father had once told her, without irony, that it was the most useful professional skill she had.
The woman in 2A turned her head.
She did it slowly. She looked first at the boarding pass, held out in Naomi's hand, and then she looked up, along the cream sleeve of the blazer, to the mulberry silk at Naomi's throat, to the braids, to the gold earrings, to Naomi's face. It took perhaps a second and a half. In that second and a half, Naomi watched her decide something. She had watched people decide that thing about her for her whole life, in classrooms and lecture halls and