The light from the window beside her had become very harsh. It was the same gray overcast light that it had been all morning, but now it seemed to fall on her face like a lamp in an interrogation room, cold and flat and without mercy, and she was suddenly, acutely conscious of every line on her face, every crease at the corners of her eyes and her mouth, the fine lines on her forehead that her dermatologist in Greenwich injected every four months, the faint softening along her jaw. She was fifty-two years old. She felt, sitting in that seat, every single day of it.
She leaned forward. She did not decide to. Her body simply leaned, toward the aisle, toward the young woman, the way a person leans toward a ledge they are afraid of. Her hands gripped the armrests. Another gasp came out of her, smaller than the first, a hitch of breath that caught in her throat.
Then she spoke.
She had meant to say something firm. Something with authority. Something like, I beg your pardon, or, I'd like to speak to whoever is in charge, or, do you have any idea who I am, which was a thing she had said perhaps four times in her life and been ashamed of each time, but which she had said nonetheless, because it had always worked. She had meant to sound like her father across a conference table.
What came out instead was a whisper. It was thin and high and it shook, the way her mother's voice used to shake at the end, in the hospice in Rye, when she was asking for things she could no longer quite name. It had a rasp in it, a kind of dry crackle at the bottom of each word, as if her vocal cords had forgotten how to close.
"What did you just do?"
She heard it. Everyone heard it. It fell into the silent cabin like a coin into a well.
The young woman in the aisle did not answer. She did not look down. She stood exactly as she had been standing, phone at her side, chin level, eyes forward.
Catherine stared up at her. Her brow had drawn together into deep furrows. Her lips, which she had painted that morning in a soft rose color she had worn for twenty years, had gone pale, and they hung slightly parted, and a breath went in and out of them, shallow and quick.
Somewhere ahead of them, at the front of the cabin, behind the walnut paneling of the bulkhead, there was a sound. A heavy metallic click. The sound of a lock being released.
* * *
The cockpit door on the refitted aircraft had been one of the small fights of the Signature project. The regulators required a reinforced, bulletproof, intrusion-resistant door between the flight deck and the cabin, a slab of armored composite with an electronic lock and a keypad and a camera. The designers had wanted it to disappear into the walnut paneling of the forward bulkhead, so that the first thing a Signature passenger saw on stepping aboard was not a gray steel door with warning placards but a wall of warm wood. The engineers had said it could not be done without adding weight. The designers had said it could. In the end it had been done, at a cost per aircraft that Naomi still did not like to think about, with a veneer of real walnut laminated to the face of the armored door and a sliding track that let the whole panel retract smoothly to the left, into a pocket in the bulkhead, instead of swinging out into the narrow forward galley.
It made a sound when it opened. The engineers had never managed to get rid of it. A deep, heavy click as the electronic lock released, and then the low hum of the track motor as the door slid back into the wall.
Every head in the cabin turned toward it.
The door slid open to the left. Behind it, framed in the opening, was the flight deck: a narrow space crowded with screens and switches, glowing softly green and amber and white, and beyond the screens the long windshield, filled edge to edge with the flat gray light of the morning sky. The light came through the windshield and fell back into the cabin, so that for a moment the figure who stepped into the doorway was a silhouette against it, tall and broad-shouldered, his face in shadow.
Then he stepped forward into the cabin, into the warm light from the ceiling, and became a man.