Richard's seat.
She thought about sitting in it. She thought about sitting in it for seven hours, beside this young woman in the cream suit. She thought about the young woman settling into 2A, into her window, her eleven years, and opening a laptop, and not speaking to her, not looking at her, all the way across the ocean. She thought about the faces in row 3 behind her, the old man and his wife, who would be looking at the back of her head for seven hours. She thought about the young man in row 4 with his telephone. She thought about getting off the airplane at Heathrow and walking up the jet bridge past Graham, who would say goodbye, Mrs. Ashworth, safe travels, in a voice that would not be the voice he had used for eleven years.
She thought about Wednesday. Lunch in Islington. Olivia, and the man named Kwame, and a baby due in March.
She thought: I cannot. I cannot do it. I cannot sit beside her.
And she understood, with a kind of distant horror, that the reason she could not was not the reason she wanted it to be. It was not humiliation. Or it was not only humiliation. It was that if she sat down in 2C beside this woman, she would have to sit there for seven hours with the knowledge of what she had said and why she had said it, and there would be nowhere to put it. No window to look out of. No one to blame. Just the ocean, and the seat, and the woman beside her, and the sentence that had come out of her mouth.
"I'd like a different seat," she said.
The captain looked at her. "Ma'am?"
"A different seat. Not this one. Anywhere else. Row 3, row 4, I don't mind. I'll move. I'll be perfectly courteous. I simply... I would prefer not to sit here."
Whitaker glanced at Graham. Graham looked at the tablet in his hands and shook his head, very slightly. "Signature's full, Captain," he said quietly. "Every seat. There's nothing in premium economy either. We're at capacity all the way back."
"I'll sit anywhere," Catherine said. Her voice was rising now, and she could hear it rising and could not stop it. "In the back. In economy. I don't care. Put me in the back."
"Ma'am, the aircraft is full."
"Then move someone."
The words were out before she could stop them. They hung in the air of the cabin. She heard them, and she heard what they meant, and she heard the old woman in 3C draw in a small sharp breath behind her. She saw the captain's face change. Not much. A very slight settling, around the eyes, as though something had been decided.
She had done it again. She had asked them to move someone. She had asked them to take some other person, some person she did not know and would never see, out of the seat that they had paid for, so that she would not have to sit beside the woman she had insulted. She had done it without thinking, the same way she had flicked her hand. It was simply the way her mind worked. It was the shape of the world she lived in, a world where, when something was unpleasant, someone else could always be moved.
She put her hand to her mouth.
"Mrs. Ashworth," the captain said. His voice was still level, still courteous. But it had gone somewhere very far away. "I'm not going to move another passenger out of their assigned seat. I've offered you yours. If you're not willing to take it, then I'm going to have to ask you to leave the aircraft. The gate staff will help you with rebooking."
"You can't..." Catherine began, and stopped.
She looked up at Naomi Morgan.
She did not know what she expected to see. Triumph, perhaps. Satisfaction. That cool, faint not-quite-smile that had appeared at the corner of her mouth a few minutes ago, when she said, now let's discuss who belongs here. She would almost have welcomed it. It would have given her something to be angry at.
There was nothing like that in Naomi's face. There was nothing in it that Catherine could fight. Naomi was looking at her with an expression that was grave and quiet and not unsympathetic, an expression Catherine had seen once before, a long time ago, on the face of the nurse at the hospice in Rye on the last evening, when she had come out into the corridor to say that it would not be long now.
It was the look of someone who was very sorry about something that could not be changed.
"I'll go," Catherine said.
She did not know she was going to say it. It came out of her the way the other things had come out of her that morning, without asking permission.