"Mrs. Ashworth," the gate agent said, beside her, quietly. "I'll take you to the service desk at the gate. We'll get your bag offloaded and look at options for rebooking you."
"Thank you."
"Is there someone you'd like me to call?"
"No." Catherine paused. "No. Thank you."
They walked. The jet bridge had a slight upward slope to it, and Catherine found that she was out of breath by the time they reached the top. At the top was the door to the gate area, and beyond the door, the sounds of the terminal: the announcements, the rolling suitcases, the voices, the television screens playing the morning news to rows of empty seats.
The gate area for B23 was almost empty. Most of the passengers for 247 had boarded. A few stragglers sat in the rows of chairs by the window, waiting for the final call. A man in a suit was arguing with an agent at the next gate over about a missed connection. A cleaning woman in a gray smock was pushing a wide dust mop slowly along the carpet near the windows, her headphones in, her eyes on the floor.
Catherine looked at her.
She did not know why. She would wonder about it later. The cleaning woman was perhaps sixty, small and slight, Black, with her hair tucked up under a gray cap. She was pushing the mop in long, even strokes, the way a person does a job they have done for a very long time and no longer need to think about. She did not look up as Catherine passed. Catherine was not even sure she had seen her. To her, Catherine supposed, she was just another passenger, another camel coat and leather bag, part of the pleasant blur of faces that moved through the terminal all day long and was gone by evening.
Catherine stopped walking.
"Mrs. Ashworth?" the gate agent said.
"I'm sorry," Catherine said. "I just need a moment."
She went to the window and stood there, holding her coat. Below her, at the end of the jet bridge, the nose of the aircraft sat in the gray morning, its windshield reflecting the clouds. She could see, if she leaned close to the glass, the faint shapes of the pilots behind the windshield, two dark figures in the cockpit, one of them in the left seat and one of them standing behind it. She could see the forward door, still open, the jet bridge still attached. She could see a ground crewman in an orange vest standing beside the nose gear with a set of headphones on, talking to someone on the flight deck. She could see, along the side of the fuselage, the row of oval windows of the Signature cabin, and she counted them from the front, one, two, and found the second one, 2A, the window she had sat beside for eleven years, and there was nobody in it. Just the gray reflection of the sky.
She stood there for a long time.
Behind her, the gate agent waited, and the cleaning woman pushed her mop along the carpet, and the television screens above the seats played the morning news. A weather map of the East Coast. A story about a bridge in Maryland. Something about the stock market.
Eventually the gate agent said, gently, "Mrs. Ashworth, we've got your bag coming off. If you'd like to come to the desk when you're ready, we can see about getting you on another flight to London. There's a seat on our 6:40 this evening, or I can look at partners."
"Not Meridian," Catherine said, to the window.
The agent paused. "Ma'am?"
"I'd prefer not to fly Meridian today," Catherine said. She heard how it sounded and did not care. "Is there anything else?"
"I can check British Airways. They have an evening departure. It would get you in tomorrow morning."
Tomorrow morning. Wednesday. Lunch was at one o'clock. She would arrive at Heathrow at seven, and take a car to the hotel, and shower, and lie down for a few hours, and then go to Islington, and sit across a table from her daughter and her daughter's husband, and she would be very, very polite.
Or she would not go at all. She could cancel. She could send a message saying that something had come up. It would be easy. Olivia would not be surprised. Olivia would read the message and put her phone face down on the table and say to Kwame, well, there you are, and that would be that. And Catherine would fly home, or not fly anywhere, and sit in the big house in Greenwich and wake at three in the morning, and nothing would be different.