Her hair was in cornrows that swept back cleanly from her forehead and gathered at the nape of her neck into long box braids that fell nearly to the middle of her back. She had sat for nine hours on Sunday to have them done, in a chair in a salon on Fulton Street where the woman who braided her had been braiding her since she was fourteen. It was a style that lasted, that traveled well, that she did not have to think about for six weeks. It was also, she knew, a style that some people in some rooms would look at before they looked at her face. She had made her peace with that a long time ago. Or she had made something with it, at any rate, that she called peace when she was tired.
Last, she put on the earrings.
They were gold, long and geometric, a chain of elongated links that ended in a slender oval drop. They moved when she turned her head and caught the light in a way that she liked. Her father had given them to her the day she passed her aircraft dispatcher certification exam, when she was twenty-three and still working nights in the Meridian operations center, before business school, before any of it. He had not been a man who bought jewelry. He had stood in the doorway of her old apartment in Jersey City holding a small box with the receipt still taped to the bottom of it, and he had said, "The woman at the store said these were for someone who was going places," and then he had looked embarrassed, and then he had said, "Well. You are," and gone to get a beer out of her refrigerator without asking.
She wore them every time she flew.
She checked the time. 5:22. The car would be downstairs at 5:45.
In the kitchen she made coffee in the small French press and drank it standing at the counter while she read through the folder that her assistant had prepared. The folder was printed, not digital, because Naomi read paper more carefully than she read screens and because Lena Okafor had worked for her long enough to know it.
On the first page was the board agenda for Thursday in London. On the second page was a summary of the customer experience data for the Signature cabin, the premium product that Meridian had launched eleven months earlier on its transatlantic routes. Lie-flat seats, a dedicated check-in, a lounge at each end, a cabin of only sixteen seats finished in cream leather and walnut veneer. It had been the most expensive single investment in the company's history and it had been Naomi's idea, pushed through in her first year against the doubts of half the board. By most measures it was working. Load factors were above projection. Revenue per seat was above projection. The industry press had been generous. The board, on Thursday, was going to vote on whether to extend the product to four more routes, which would mean refitting eleven more aircraft at a cost of a little under two hundred million dollars.
The third page was the one she had asked for specifically, and it was the reason she was getting on a plane this morning without telling anyone who did not need to know.
It was a list of complaints.
Not many. Meridian's premium customers complained less than its economy customers, which was expected, and the overall satisfaction scores in Signature were the best the company had ever recorded. But Naomi had asked the customer relations team to pull every complaint from the premium cabins over the last eleven months that mentioned the crew, a seat dispute, or the way a passenger had been treated relative to other passengers. And she had read them all, over three nights, in this same kitchen.
There was a cardiologist from Philadelphia who had been asked to show her boarding pass three times between the door of the aircraft and her seat, once by a flight attendant and twice by other passengers, and who had written, in a letter that was more precise than angry, that nobody else in the cabin had been asked even once. There was a couple from Atlanta, on their honeymoon, who had been upgraded with points and who had arrived at their seats to