Catherine had booked the flight that evening.
She had booked it late, though, because she had sat for two days with the email open on her laptop, unable to answer it, writing replies and deleting them. By the time she had called the Sovereign line on Thursday, the Signature cabin on Tuesday morning's flight was almost full. They had found her a seat. They had found her 2C, the aisle seat in the second row. The window, 2A, her seat, was already taken.
"Who has it?" she had asked.
"I'm afraid I can't share other passengers' details, Mrs. Ashworth."
"I'm not asking for their details. I'm asking whether you can move them. I always sit in 2A. It's in my profile."
"I can see that it's your preferred seat, yes. Unfortunately, it's been assigned to another passenger who selected it at booking. I can put you on the waitlist in case they change, or I can look at other flights..."
"I don't want another flight. I want my seat."
The agent had apologized. The agent had offered miles. The agent had offered her the window seat in row 3, 3A, which Catherine had declined, because 3A was directly behind the galley partition and it was not the same. Catherine had hung up the phone with her hand shaking slightly and had stood for a while in the kitchen, feeling foolish and furious at the same time, and not entirely sure which feeling was the larger one.
It was not about the seat. She knew it was not about the seat. But the seat was the thing she could do something about.
Richard used to sit in 2C. That was the thing. For eleven years, since the first time they flew together on Meridian, back when it was a scrappy little airline with a business class that was barely better than a good economy seat and her husband had chosen it because it was cheaper than British Airways and because he liked to tell people at dinner parties that he had discovered it. She had sat by the window. He had sat on the aisle. He had always ordered a whisky before takeoff and fallen asleep before they reached Nova Scotia, and she had looked out the window at the ocean and thought about whatever she was thinking about in those years, which she could no longer quite remember.
Richard had left two years ago. He had not left for anyone in particular, which was somehow worse; he had simply said, at dinner one evening, that he was tired, that he had been tired for a long time, and that he thought they both deserved to be happier than they were. He was living in a converted loft in Tribeca now. He was taking a pottery class. Catherine had heard this from a friend at the club and had gone home and sat in her car in the garage for half an hour without turning off the engine.
She still had the house. She still had the money, most of it; the settlement had been generous, because Richard was generous, which was one of the many things about him that she had stopped noticing years before he left. She had the club, the committees, the foundation board. She had her Sovereign card, which had been in her name and not his, because she was the one who flew to London and Paris and Geneva four or five times a year for the foundation and for the shopping and for the life that she had built around the edges of his. She had the seat. 2A. The window.
It was absurd. She knew it was absurd. She was fifty-two years old and she was standing in an airport lounge at seven in the morning arguing with a girl in a uniform about a chair.
But the girl in the uniform came back from the phone and said, "Mrs. Ashworth, I've spoken to the gate. I'm afraid the seat assignment is confirmed. But they've noted your preference, and if there's anything they can do once boarding begins, they'll certainly try."
And Catherine heard, in that last sentence, the thing she had been hoping to hear. Once boarding begins. Certainly try. It was the language of a door left slightly open.
"Thank you," she said, and smiled for the first time that morning, a small, tight, gracious smile. "That's very kind of you."
She went back to her chair by the window and picked up her coffee. She did not look around the lounge. If she had, she might have noticed a young Black woman in a cream suit sitting thirty feet away with a cup of coffee, watching her. But Catherine Ashworth did not look around rooms. She had not looked around a room in a very long time. The rooms she moved through had always arranged themselves around her, and the people in them had always been, to her, a kind of pleasant blur, a background of faces against which the few people who mattered stood out sharp and clear.