Behind her came the red Nebraska windbreaker. The man in it stopped at the forward galley, glanced into the cabin at 2A, saw the woman sitting there, and nodded once to himself, as though a box had been checked.
"Thirty-three E," he said to Billie, holding up his boarding pass. "I know. I'm going."
"Mr. Vandermolen?" She had read the name on the reissue slip Esperanza had stapled to the courier letter. "That was a kind thing."
"Hendrik," he said. "It was a seat." He had the flat vowels of the western plains, Nebraska or the Dakotas, and he spoke as though words cost something. "My knees are bad. They ain't that bad. And she was carrying something for somebody's kid." He looked at the cooler under 1A for a moment longer. "I put my name in that registry in 1994. They swab you now. Back then they took blood. Nobody ever called me." He shrugged. "So."
He went down the aisle. Billie watched the red windbreaker go all the way back through the cabin, almost to the lavatories, and fold itself into a middle seat between a college girl with headphones and a soldier in fatigues, and the soldier looked at him and moved his elbow off the armrest without being asked.
Then the general boarding came, and the airplane filled, and Billie stopped watching any one person, because there were a hundred and sixty of them and you could only watch them all at once.
Garrison Yancey came on in the second group, with the other Summit flyers. She knew him before he got to the door, because she had seen a thousand of him. Early fifties. Fit in the way of a man who rode an expensive bicycle on weekends and talked about it on Mondays. A navy quarter-zip with the logo of a private equity firm in Greenwood Village, khakis, loafers without socks, a phone in his hand that he did not look up from. On his roller bag a black-and-silver tag that said 2 MILLION MILER in raised letters. He had the specific ease, coming through the door, of a man walking into his own kitchen.
"Hey," he said, without looking up.
"Good afternoon, welcome aboard."
He went to row 2, saw that the window seat was occupied, and stopped.