"Yes, ma'am."
Simone looked at Linda Marsh. "Ms. Marsh, you were present for everything that happened this morning. You watched. You said nothing. You laughed." She paused. "Your conduct will be reviewed as part of the same investigation."
Linda's lips trembled. She nodded once.
Simone adjusted her reading glasses, picked up her tote bag, and walked toward the Suburban without looking back.
Behind her, Derek Greer stood alone on the tarmac. No passengers to impress, no cabin to command, no aircraft to call his. Just a man in a wrinkled uniform watching the woman he'd humiliated walk away with everything he'd ever wanted: power, respect, and the plane he'd been pretending was his.
The crew shuttle idled on the far side of the tarmac, a white van with tinted windows and the Fletcher Aeronautics logo on the side. It was used for transporting flight crews between terminals. Today, it was a hearse for a career.
Derek Greer walked toward it alone. No one walked with him. No one offered to carry his flight bag. The ground crew watched him cross the asphalt—the same ground crew who had snapped to attention when he taxied in forty minutes ago. Now they looked through him like glass.
He climbed into the shuttle, sat in the back row, and put his flight bag on the seat beside him. The driver, a young man in a Fletcher polo, glanced in the rearview mirror but said nothing. He'd heard. Everyone had heard. News travels fast on a tarmac; bad news travels faster.
The van pulled away. Greer watched the Gulfstream G700 through the rear window. His plane. Except it was never his plane. It had always been hers. Every bolt, every stitch, every instrument he'd ever touched, every announcement he'd made from that cockpit—my aircraft—had been a lie he didn't know he was telling. That thought would follow him for a long time.
Inside the terminal, Linda Marsh sat in a plastic chair outside the crew lounge. Her hands were clasped in her lap. Her phone was face down on the table. She hadn't called anyone, hadn't texted anyone. She was thinking about the exact moment she could have spoken up and didn't.
The moment Greer told the guards to grab the woman's arm, Linda had been standing four feet away. She'd seen the red marks form on the woman's skin. Then she'd walked to first class and poured champagne.
Administrative review: that's what Patricia Hayes had called it. It sounded clinical, professional. But Linda knew what it meant. Her name was now attached to an incident file. And in aviation, incident files don't disappear; they follow you. They show up in background checks and reference calls and whispered conversations between hiring managers who always remember the name, but never remember the context.
Eleven years of perfect service records, one morning of silence, and now she sat in a plastic chair, waiting for someone to tell her what her future looked like.