"Ma'am?" the captain said.
"I said I'll go." She reached for her tote bag. Her hands were shaking so badly that she knocked the hardcover novel off the ledge and it fell to the floor beside the magazine. She did not pick it up. "I won't stay where I'm not wanted. I won't sit here and be stared at for seven hours like an animal in a zoo. I'll go."
She stood up.
She stood up too fast, and the blood went out of her head, and for a moment the cabin swayed around her and she had to put her hand on the back of the seat to steady herself. The cream leather was warm under her palm from where she had been sitting. She stood there, holding it, until the cabin stopped moving.
"My coat," she said. "It's in the bin."
Tessa came forward from the galley. She had not been asked. She simply came, quietly, and reached up and opened the overhead bin above row 2 and took down the camel coat, folded exactly as Catherine had folded it, and held it out. She did not say anything. Her face was composed and professional and very young.
Catherine took the coat. "Thank you," she said, automatically, and then, because the girl was still standing there, looking at her, she looked back, and saw in the young flight attendant's dark eyes something that she could not at first identify. Then she identified it. It was pity. Not cruel pity. Not the kind that enjoys itself. The ordinary, helpless kind, that a person feels for someone who has hurt themselves badly in a way that cannot be undone.
It was worse than anything else that had happened that morning.
Catherine looked away. She put the coat over her arm. She picked up her tote bag. She stood in the aisle beside row 2, half a step from Naomi Morgan, close enough to smell her perfume, something faint and clean, like cedar, like the lounge. She did not look at her.
There was a gate agent now at the forward door. Catherine had not seen her arrive. A woman in her forties with a red Meridian lanyard and a radio clipped to her belt, standing just inside the threshold with an expression of careful neutrality.
Catherine walked toward her.
It was only a few steps. Row 2 to the forward door, past row 1, past the galley. She had walked those steps perhaps a hundred times in eleven years, getting on and getting off, and she had never once thought about them. Now each one felt like a mile. She was aware of the faces turning to watch her as she passed. The man in 1A, who had taken off his noise-cancelling headphones at some point and was sitting up now, watching her with frank curiosity. The man in the tracksuit in 1F, who looked at her for a moment and then looked away, out his window, with an expression she could not read. Graham, standing beside the galley with the tablet against his chest. He looked at her, and opened his mouth, and then closed it, and lowered his eyes.
Eleven years. Eleven years of welcome back, Mrs. Ashworth, and how's Olivia, and the usual, Mrs. Ashworth? And he lowered his eyes.
At the door she stopped. She did not know why. She stood there, with the cold air from the jet bridge on her face, and she turned around and looked back down the cabin.
The captain had stepped back toward the galley, out of the aisle. Naomi Morgan was still standing beside row 2. She had not sat down. She had not moved at all, except to turn her head, and she was looking at Catherine now, down the short length of the cabin, the gray light from the windshield falling past the open cockpit door onto the side of her face.
Catherine wanted to say something. She did not know what it was. It was very large and she could feel it in her chest, pressing upward, and it had something to do with Olivia and with Kwame and with a long lawn running down to the water in Rye and a mother who had said never make a scene, and it had something to do with the sentence she had said and the way the word belong had dropped out of her mouth as though it had weight of its own. She stood in the doorway and held the camel coat against her chest and tried to find the first word of it.
She could not find it.
She turned and walked out onto the jet bridge.
* * *
The jet bridge was cold. It always was, in the mornings; it was a long tunnel of corrugated metal and plastic paneling suspended in the air, and the wind off Jamaica Bay found its way into the seams. Catherine walked up it with the gate agent beside her and the camel coat over her arm and her tote bag on her shoulder, and she did not put the coat on, because putting it on would have required her to stop walking, and she was afraid that if she stopped walking she would not start again.