"And this came in." Dariela reached down beside her seat and tore a strip of paper off the printer and handed it back without looking. It was from the dispatcher in Denver, in the dispatcher's capital letters. CAPT 1418 PLS CALL DUTY MGR ON ARRIVAL RE CUSTOMER CONCERN SEAT 02B. CUSTOMER CONTACTED EXEC OFFICE VIA INFLIGHT WIFI. THX.
"That was fast," Billie said.
"Two million miles," Dariela said. "You get a hotline." She was quiet for a moment. "I flew with him in June. A four-day. Denver, Newark, Orlando, Denver. On the second night in Newark I came down to the hotel lobby at three in the morning to get a bottle of water out of the machine, because the one in my room was broken, and he was sitting in the lobby in his uniform pants and a T-shirt with a hotel blanket around his shoulders. Just sitting. Watching the TV with the sound off. It was a cooking show. I asked if he was okay and he said, Sigrun would've been sixty yesterday. And then he said, sorry, that's not your problem. And I sat with him for half an hour and we watched a man make a pie in silence." She shrugged. "I thought about calling somebody when we got home. Professional standards. Peer support. The union has people. I didn't, because what do you say? Captain's sad? Everybody's sad." She looked out at the lightning. "I should have said something."
"I should have said something ten years ago," Billie said.
Dariela glanced back at her, then forward again. "I heard what you said to him in the galley," she said. "The part about Houston."
"Everybody did."
"I didn't know you'd—" She stopped. "I didn't know that was you."
"Neither did I," Billie said, "for a long time. That's the thing about it."
The interphone chimed. Billie picked it up and heard Gunnar's voice say the words, and she looked through the peephole at the forward galley, and saw him standing there alone in front of the cart with his hat in his hand, and behind him, through the gap past the cart, row 2, where Laverne Grier sat with her face turned toward the window. She opened the door. She came out and he went in. On his way past her, in the narrow space at the threshold of the door, he stopped for half a second.