Then the young woman had said, I'd like to sit in it.
And Catherine had felt something rise in her that she did not, at the time, examine. It was something like outrage and something like fear, and underneath both of those it was something else, something that had to do with Olivia, and with a man named Kwame whom she had met exactly twice and been very polite to, and with a phone call eighteen months ago in which her daughter had said, yes, you do. It was something that had been waiting in her for a long time, and it rose up and came out of her in the shape of a small flick of her left hand and a sentence she would have given almost anything, later, to take back.
This row is for premium passengers who belong here.
She had heard herself say it. She had heard the stress fall on belong, heavier than she had intended, as though the word had weight of its own and had simply dropped out of her mouth. And she had felt, in the instant after she said it, a strange double sensation, as though there were two Catherines in the seat: one of them sitting back in satisfaction, chin raised, waiting for the young woman to retreat, and the other one somewhere far above, looking down at the first one with an expression of slow, dawning horror.
She had ignored the second one. She had been ignoring her for years.
Then the young woman had said, I see.
And it was the way she said it. That was what Catherine would come back to, at three in the morning. Not the words, which were nothing, two small words that people said a hundred times a day. The way she said them. Low and flat and final, the way Catherine's father, who had been a partner at a law firm on Wall Street for thirty-four years, used to say I see to opposing counsel across a conference table, in the moment after they had made a mistake that they did not yet know they had made.
Catherine had turned back to the window. She had looked out at the gray morning and the baggage carts and the wing of the next aircraft, and she had told herself that it was over. She had told herself that the young woman would now go to 2C, or to wherever she was supposed to go, and that the flight would leave, and that she would sit by her window and look at the ocean and think about Olivia, and that on Wednesday she would have lunch in a restaurant in Islington with her daughter and her daughter's husband and she would be very, very polite.
She heard a small electronic sound behind her. The soft chime of a phone being unlocked.
She did not turn around.
* * *
Naomi had not decided to make the call until her hand was already in her pocket.
That was not quite true. She had decided, somewhere, in the stone-at-the-bottom-of-the-pond place where the decision had settled. But the part of her that thought in sentences, the part that wrote memos and sat through board meetings and calculated load factors, had not caught up yet. It caught up as she took the phone out. It caught up, and it began, very quickly and very reasonably, to object.
You said you would not do anything, it said. You told Lena. You told Eddie. You told yourself. You said you would sit in your seat and write it down.
I am going to sit in my seat, she answered it. That is exactly what I am going to do.
It is a seat dispute, said the reasonable voice. It happens a hundred times a day across the network. You do not ground an aircraft over a seat dispute.
It is not a seat dispute, she answered. It stopped being a seat dispute when the purser of this airline looked at the manifest, confirmed that I was right, and asked me to move anyway. It stopped being a seat dispute when a passenger told me in front of a full cabin that I did not belong here and a member of my crew stood in the aisle and said nothing. If I sit down in 2C now, I am telling every person in this cabin, and every person who works on this aircraft, that this is how it works. That the manifest is a suggestion. That the rules are for the people who will not make a fuss.
And if this airplane pushes back from the gate with this unresolved, she thought, with a crew that has already shown it will not enforce a seat assignment and a passenger who has already shown she will not follow one, then I will have put an unresolved conflict into a sealed aluminum tube and sent it out over the North Atlantic for seven hours. Any dispatcher in the operations center would tell me that is a bad idea. I was a dispatcher in the operations center. It is a bad idea.