The last leg of the trip was supposed to be the easy one.
Captain Naomi Whitfield had flown the first three days of the rotation the way she flew everything, by the book and a little ahead of it, and the fourth day had started reasonably enough with a sunrise departure out of Raleigh and a lunch she ate standing up in a crew room in Charlotte.
Then a line of thunderstorms built over the Ohio Valley like a wall somebody had decided to put up without a permit, and the afternoon came apart one ground stop at a time.
By the time the Airbus rolled onto runway two-eight at Calder Regional International, it was eleven forty-one at night, she had been on duty for thirteen hours and fifty-two minutes, and the only thing she wanted in the world was her own bed and the sound of her own front door locking behind her.
"Nice one, Captain," said her first officer, a soft-spoken kid from Tulsa named Patel who had spent the whole trip apologizing for his checklist voice. "Didn't even feel it."
"That was the runway's doing," Naomi said. "It's a very forgiving runway."
"You say that every time."
"Because it's true every time."
She taxied them in past the dark cargo ramp and the glowing fuel farm, set the parking brake at gate B9, and ran the shutdown flow with hands that knew the work better than her tired brain did. Through the side window she could see the ramp crew coming out to meet the airplane, orange vests and yellow wands, and at the head of them the stocky silhouette of Hector Ruiz, the overnight crew chief, who had been marshalling airplanes at Calder since before Naomi was hired and who, as far as she could tell, had never once in that time been in a bad mood. He gave the cockpit a two-finger salute off the brim of his cap. She returned it.
Patel was already on his phone. "My wife says the baby's teething," he reported. "So I'm going home to not sleep. Different kind of not sleeping."
"Go," she said. "I've got the paperwork."
She did the paperwork, said goodnight to the crew, and walked up the jet bridge with her roller bag and her flight bag and her cap tucked under her arm, through a terminal that had gone over to the hollow nighttime hum of floor polishers and closed shutters, and down the long escalator to the employee exit, where the shuttle to Lot E was idling at the curb with its doors folded open.