"Yes," she said. "British Airways. Thank you."
* * *
It took forty minutes. Forty minutes at the service desk at gate B23, watching the agent type and print and call someone on the phone and type again, while through the window behind the desk Catherine watched the jet bridge of Meridian 247 remain attached to the aircraft, and the forward door remain open, and the ground crewman in the orange vest stand beside the nose gear with his headphones on, waiting.
She did not understand why the airplane was still there. She had left. Surely, now that she had left, it could go. She had assumed, in a vague way, that the whole thing had been about her, and that once she was gone the flight would close its door and push back and fly to London as if she had never existed. But the door stayed open. The bridge stayed attached. At one point she saw the captain come out of the forward door onto the bridge, and stand there for a minute talking to someone she could not see, and then go back in. At one point she saw a second gate agent go down the jet bridge carrying a folder.
"Why isn't it leaving?" she asked the agent.
The agent looked up from her screen. She was the same woman who had walked Catherine up the bridge, and she had been courteous and efficient for forty minutes, and now she looked at Catherine with an expression that Catherine could not read.
"I don't know, ma'am," the agent said. "It's on an operations hold. They don't tell us why."
But Catherine thought, looking at her, that she did know. Or that she could guess. And Catherine thought, with a strange sinking feeling, that perhaps it had not been about her at all. That perhaps she had only been the thing that happened to be standing in the way when something much larger came through the door.
The agent printed her boarding pass for the British Airways flight. It was on thin white paper, from an ordinary printer, and it said ASHWORTH/CATHERINE MRS and CLUB WORLD and, under SEAT, 7A. A window.
Catherine looked at it for a long moment.
"Is there anything else I can do for you, Mrs. Ashworth?" the agent asked.
"No," Catherine said. "Thank you. You've been very kind."
She meant it, she found. That was the strangest thing about the whole morning. She meant it.
She took her boarding pass and her coat and her bag and walked away from the gate, down the long concourse toward the main terminal, past the shops and the restaurants and the rows of chairs and the people, all the people, hundreds of them, going somewhere. Halfway down the concourse she stopped at a bench beside a window and sat down, because her legs had begun to shake again and she was afraid she would fall.
She sat there for a while. Then she took out her phone.
She opened her messages and found Olivia's name. The last message in the thread was from three weeks ago. It was Olivia's email, forwarded to her phone, the one about the baby. Below it was Catherine's reply, which had taken her two days to write and which said, in its entirety: Darling, that's wonderful news. Wednesday would be lovely. I'll be there. Love, Mum.
She looked at it. She started to type something underneath it. She typed: Darling, I'm afraid something has come up and I
She deleted it.
She typed: I'm going to be a bit late. My flight
She deleted that too.
She sat for a long time with the empty message box open and the cursor blinking in it, and the people going past, and the voices on the loudspeakers announcing flights to Chicago and Miami and Rome. And then, finally, without quite knowing why, she pressed the button to call.
It was afternoon in London. Olivia answered on the fourth ring.
"Mum?" Her voice was wary. "Is everything all right?"
Catherine opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She closed her eyes. Her hand was shaking so badly that she had to hold the phone with both of them.
"Mum? Are you there?"
"I'm here," Catherine said. Her voice came out as a whisper. "I'm here, darling. I'm still coming. Tomorrow. I'll be a little late, that's all. I missed my flight."
"You missed your flight? You never miss flights."
"I know." Catherine laughed, or made a sound that was meant to be a laugh. "I know. I did something very stupid this morning, Liv."
There was a silence on the line. When Olivia spoke again her voice had changed. It was more careful, and less wary, and something else, something Catherine had not heard in it for a very long time.
"What did you do?"