"I don't—" He stopped. He looked down at the letter in his hand, and then back at her, and there was something moving in his face now, far back, a shape coming up through deep water. "Billie, I remember a—there was a guy in Houston. With the bag. I remember there was a problem."
"There wasn't a problem. There was a Black man in 3C."
"That's not fair."
"No," she said. "It wasn't."
From the other side of the curtain came the small rising murmur of a cabin talking about what it had just seen. From the open door came the whine of the APU and the voice of a ramper on the headset at the nose, asking the flight deck in a bored voice if they were about ready. And then the flight deck door opened behind Gunnar, and Dariela Montes put her head out with her headset around her neck and her face very still.
"Captain," she said. "Ramp wants us off the gate in eleven minutes or we sit through the next hold. And we've got a message from scheduling." She held up her own strip of thermal paper. "If we sit through the next hold and it runs like the last two, we can't get to Baltimore inside the FDP. It'd be an extension. Your signature. Dispatch wants to know now if you'll accept one."
He looked at her. He looked, Billie thought, like a man doing long division in a house that was on fire.
He had been on duty since 9:30 that morning. Billie knew because she had seen the trip sheet, and because she had done the same arithmetic every flight attendant learned to do in her head: report time, segments, time zone, where the line was. He had flown Denver to Omaha and back before lunch on a reserve callout, and then scheduling had handed him this, and the two holds had eaten the margin the way rain eats a sandcastle. Federal rules capped how long a pilot could be on duty before his last airplane was parked at the gate, and the cap depended on when you started and how many legs you flew, and a captain could stretch it, a little, under some circumstances, if he believed he and his crew were fit, and if the company agreed, and if he wrote it down. It was the captain's signature on the extension. It always was. It meant: I believe I am safe. It meant: if I am wrong, it is mine.
"I'm also going to put that in the report," Billie said quietly. "If you ask me how you seemed today. You called Amberly Amber twice in the briefing. You looked at Tomasz like he was speaking another language. You've been reading that strip of paper for ten minutes and it's an hour old. I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm saying you're not okay. And I'm sorry. I know why. I'm so sorry about Sigrun. But you don't get to do this to that woman because you're not okay."
"Billie," Dariela said. Very gently. As a question.