"And Kwame," Catherine said. She turned to him. It was the hardest thing she had done in a very long time, harder than standing up from 2A, harder than walking down the aisle past Graham, harder than the jet bridge. She made herself look him in the face. "The first time I met you. I asked you where you were really from. You told me Leeds and I asked you where you were really from. I knew exactly what I was doing. I told myself I was making conversation. I wasn't. I was telling you that I didn't think you belonged in my family." She drew a breath. "I've been doing it to you ever since. Being polite. Olivia was right. I knew what she meant. I've always known."
Kwame looked at her for a long time. His face did not change, at first. Then something in it moved, very slightly, around the eyes. Not forgiveness. Catherine could see that it was not forgiveness. Something more cautious than that, and more real.
"Thank you for saying it," he said quietly.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me," Catherine said. Her voice was shaking now. "I don't think I'm entitled to that. I don't know what I'm asking. I think I just needed you both to hear me say it out loud. Because I never have. And I'm fifty-two years old and I'm going to have a grandchild in March, and I don't..." Her voice broke. She put her hand over her mouth. When she could speak again, it came out as a whisper. "I don't want to be the grandmother who has to be managed. I don't want my grandchild to learn to be careful around me. I don't want to be somebody this baby has to be polite to."
Olivia was crying openly now. Across the table, Kwame reached over and took her hand and held it.
"I don't know how to be different," Catherine said. "I'm not sure I can. I've been the way I am for a very long time. But I'd like to try. If you'll let me. I'd like you to tell me when I get it wrong. Both of you. I'd like to stop being polite to you, Kwame, and start actually knowing you. If you're willing. I'll understand if you're not."
Kwame was quiet for a long moment. He looked at Olivia. Olivia looked back at him and something passed between them, a long silent conversation that Catherine was not part of and did not need to be.
"I grew up in Leeds," Kwame said finally. "Chapeltown. My mum's a nurse, my dad drove a bus for thirty years. I've been asked where I'm really from probably a thousand times in my life. Teachers asked. Employers asked. A client asked me last month, in a meeting, after I'd presented a design for his building. I'm used to it." He paused. "No one has ever said sorry for it. Not once. Not until now."
He looked at her steadily.
"It's not enough," he said. "You know that."
"I know that."
"But it's something." He let go of Olivia's hand and picked up his menu. "We could start with lunch," he said. "The lamb's very good here. And then, if you'd like, Olivia and I can tell you about the baby. And you can tell us how you're going to be different. And we'll see."
Catherine looked at him. Then she looked at her daughter, who was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and laughing a little at the same time, the way she used to laugh when she was a child and had fallen off her bicycle and was not sure yet whether it hurt.
"I'd like that very much," Catherine said.
* * *
The Meridian board met on Thursday morning in a conference room on the twelfth floor of a glass building near Liverpool Street, overlooking the old brick and the new glass of the City of London. There were nine directors around the long table, and Naomi at the head of it, and Peter Lindgren and the head of inflight services and the chief financial officer along one wall, and Lena in a chair near the door with a laptop open on her knees.
The customer experience section was no longer in the appendix. It was the first item on the agenda.
Naomi had rewritten it on Wednesday, in her hotel room, working from the document she had begun on the airplane. She had sent it to the board at six o'clock that evening with a short covering note. She had not asked anyone's permission. She had not, for the first time since she took over, run it past Harold Kessler first.
She stood at the head of the table now and did not use slides.
"You've all seen the video," she said. "Most of you have probably seen it more than once. I'm not going to talk about it. I'm going to talk about why it happened."