boardrooms and hotel lobbies and once, memorably, at the front door of her own father's house when a new neighbor had come by to complain about the noise of the generator and had asked to speak to the owner. She knew what it looked like. It was a very small change in the face, a slight cooling around the eyes, a faint tightening of the mouth, and then a kind of settling, as though some internal question had been asked and answered and filed away.
The woman's expression did not become hostile. It became something worse than hostile. It became bored.
"I'm sorry," she said, in a voice that was not sorry at all. "I think you've made a mistake."
"I don't think so," Naomi said. "It says 2A."
"Mm." The woman glanced at the card again, without leaning toward it, as though it were something faintly unclean. "They do that sometimes. The machines in the terminal. They print things wrong." She looked back at Naomi's face. "This is the Signature cabin. The premium economy cabin is just behind us, through the curtain. One of the girls can show you."
Naomi did not move.
There was a small sound from the galley. Graham cleared his throat. He set the tray of hot towels down on the counter, carefully, and came forward a few steps into the aisle, his face arranged into an expression of smooth, practiced concern.
"Is everything all right here?" he asked. He spoke to the air between the two women, not to either one of them.
"There's been some confusion about the seat," the woman in 2A said, without looking away from Naomi. "I've explained to this young lady that she's in the wrong cabin."
"I'm not in the wrong cabin," Naomi said to Graham. She held the boarding pass out to him. "I'm in 2A."
Graham took the card. He looked at it. He looked at the tablet in his other hand. Naomi watched him read the manifest and watched him confirm what he already knew. She watched his face very carefully, because his face was the thing she had come here to see, more than the woman's. The woman's face she had seen a thousand times. She did not need to fly to London to see it. She needed to see what her own airline did when it was standing in the aisle between them.
"Yes," Graham said. "Yes, I see. Ms. Morgan. You're absolutely correct, you are in 2A." He handed the card back to her with a small apologetic smile. Then he turned the smile, slightly warmer, toward the woman in the window seat. "Mrs. Ashworth, I'm afraid Ms. Morgan does have 2A today."
"Graham." The woman said his name the way someone might say the name of a dog who had brought back the wrong stick. "We discussed this."
"We did, yes." He turned back to Naomi. And here it was. Naomi felt it coming the way you feel a car begin to drift on an icy road, a slow, sick, inevitable sliding. "Ms. Morgan, I wonder if I could ask a small favor. Mrs. Ashworth is one of our longest-standing Sovereign members, and this has been her seat on this route for a great many years. 2C is right here, just across the console. It's exactly the same seat, the same service, it's a lovely seat, and it has direct aisle access, which a lot of our guests actually prefer. If you wouldn't mind, just for today, I'd be very grateful. And of course I'll make sure you're very well looked after."
He smiled at her. It was a good smile. It had probably earned him most of those eleven commendation letters.
Naomi looked at him for a long moment.
She thought about the cardiologist from Philadelphia. She thought about the couple from Atlanta on their honeymoon. She thought about the young woman who had been told to put her bag in the back with the others. She thought: it would be so easy. It was an aisle seat. It was the same seat, more or less. She did not care about the window. She had flown across the Atlantic a hundred times and she had stopped looking out of airplane windows years ago. She could sit down in 2C and put her bag under the seat and open her laptop and fly to London, and write in her notes, 08:21, purser asked me to give up assigned seat to Sovereign member in wrong seat, and that would be that. It would go in a memo. The memo would go to the head of inflight services, who would look into additional training.