He had handed the controls to Rosa Delgado and a relief pilot who had been resting in the crew bunk, and he came out of the flight deck with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up, carrying a cup of coffee, and stopped beside row 2.
"Ms. Morgan," he said. "I've got about five minutes before I need to get back up there for the descent briefing. Rosa wanted me to tell you something."
"Please."
"She says thank you." He smiled slightly. "She's been with us three years. She says this is the first time she's ever heard anybody senior in this company say out loud that the captain's authority covers how passengers treat each other. She said most people think we just fly the airplane." He took a sip of coffee. "She also said, and I'm quoting, tell her the first officers have a list too."
Naomi laughed. "A list of what?"
"Of everything that's wrong with the company." He grinned through his beard. "She says it's long. She says she'd like to send it to you."
"Tell her I'd like to read it."
"I'll tell her." He was quiet for a moment, looking down the cabin, at the dimmed lights and the sleeping passengers and the long line of windows glowing with late afternoon light. "Can I ask you something, ma'am? Off the record."
"Of course."
"What happens to her? Mrs. Ashworth."
Naomi had been thinking about that. She had been thinking about it, on and off, for most of the flight, underneath everything else.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "Her Sovereign membership will be reviewed. That's policy. I'm not going to interfere with it either way. Customer relations will probably write to her. If she wants to fly with us again, she can, as long as she can follow the rules. Beyond that." She paused. "Beyond that, I think what happens to her is mostly up to her."
Whitaker nodded slowly.
"When she was standing at the door," he said. "Before she walked off. She turned around and looked at you. Did you see?"
"I saw."
"It looked like she wanted to say something."
"It did."
"Do you think she will? Someday?"
Naomi looked out the window. The coast of Ireland had appeared below them, a long, ragged, impossibly green line against the gray sea, the clouds breaking over it in great slow shadows.
"I hope so," she said. "Not for me. For her."
Whitaker looked at her for a moment longer. Then he straightened up and finished his coffee.
"I'd better get back to it," he said. "We'll have you in London in about fifty minutes. On time, near enough. We made up most of it over the ocean. Tailwind."
"Thank you, Captain."
"Dan," he said. "If that's all right."
"Dan," she said. "Thank you."
He went back up the aisle, ducked through the walnut doorway into the flight deck, and the door slid closed behind him with its heavy click.
Naomi opened her laptop. She looked at the document for a long time. Under WHAT CHANGES, where there had been nothing all afternoon, she began, finally, to type.
* * *
The restaurant in Islington was small and bright and full of plants, with a long wooden table down the middle and smaller tables along the windows, and a chalkboard menu on the back wall that changed every day. Olivia had chosen it. Catherine would not have. She would have chosen somewhere with white tablecloths and a maître d', somewhere in Mayfair, somewhere she knew how to behave. She arrived twelve minutes early and sat at a table by the window and ordered a glass of water and did not touch it.
She had slept for three hours at the hotel. She had showered and dressed and undressed and dressed again. She had put on the teal jacket and then taken it off and hung it back in the wardrobe, and she had stood looking at it for a while, the metallic thread catching the gray London light from the window, and she had understood that she would probably never wear it again. In the end she had put on a plain navy sweater and gray trousers and her pearls, and then she had taken off the pearls too, and then she had put them back on, because her hands needed something to do and the clasp gave them something.
At four minutes past one, the door opened and her daughter came in.
Olivia was thirty-one and looked, to Catherine, like a stranger who had borrowed her daughter's face. Her hair was cut short. She wore jeans and a long wool coat and no makeup. She was visibly pregnant, five months or so, one hand resting on the curve of her belly in a gesture that seemed entirely unconscious, and the sight of it made something in Catherine's chest turn over so violently that she had to put her hand flat on the table.
Behind her came Kwame.