"Why not?"
It was the question she had been asking herself in the dark for ten years, in hotel rooms in Newark and Orlando and Sacramento, with the air conditioners rattling, and she had never once said the answer aloud.
"Because I'd have had to say I signed something that wasn't true," Billie said. "In 2016 I'd been flying twenty-one years. I was one of the youngest leads in the base. I'd just bought my condo in Lakewood. I had a mother in assisted living in Ogden and a brother who couldn't keep a job, and I was the one who paid. And the captain wrote the story, and the station manager signed it, and I signed it, and the man was already gone. He was on the jet bridge with his garment bag. What was I going to do? Unsign it? Tell my base manager, I lied to the company on an official document because a captain told me to? You know what they do to you for that? Falsifying a report? I'd have been out. Or I'd have been kept, and every captain in the base would've known I was the one who turned in Gunnar Vossberg. And I told myself that he'd file a complaint, Mr. Amadi, and somebody would look at it, and they'd see. And then I didn't hear anything. And I told myself that meant it went away." She looked at the floor. "It didn't go away. It just went away from me."
Laverne was quiet.
"I can't forgive you for that," she said at last. Gently. "You understand. It isn't mine. I'd be giving you something I don't own. I'm a chemistry teacher. You can't make a thing out of nothing. You'd have to ask him."
"I know."
"But you said it today. In front of the man, and in front of me, and in front of the young woman with the baby. You said, I'm writing it down." Laverne put her hands on her knees and pushed herself up off the jumpseat, and picked up the cooler by its strap and held it against her hip again. "So write it down."
She went back to 2A. Garrison Yancey had to move his legs, this time, because she stood in the aisle beside him with the cooler and waited, not saying anything, until he did. She sat. She put the cooler back under 1A, setting it down level, label up, and put her feet on either side of it, and her hand on the strap.
Billie stood in the galley for a while longer. Then she took a blank Cabin Event Report out of the binder in the drawer under the coffee maker, because it was easier to write on paper first, the way her hands remembered, and clipped it to the back of the tablet, and began.