Rrrip.
She waited. She gave it what she would later understand was less than two minutes, and what felt at the time like an hour.
Rrrip. Press. And the humming underneath, unbroken.
"Excuse me," she said.
Marcus looked up.
"I have a presentation in the morning," Celeste said, "that is going to decide the next ten years of my life, and I paid for this seat, and I'd like to be able to hear myself think." She heard her own voice, clear and cold and pleasant, the voice that made junior vice presidents go quiet in conference rooms. And then, because the place at the back of her skull had cracked open and something old was coming up through it, she heard herself say it. "Can you keep your boy quiet?"
The words landed on the walnut table between them and lay there.
Marcus's face did something complicated. It closed first, the way a door closes, and then something behind the door went very tired. "I'm trying, ma'am," he said. "His headphones died. He's not doing it to bother you. It's how he—it helps him when things are loud."
"Things aren't loud. It's perfectly quiet. It's quiet except for him."
"Celeste," Jonah said, from across the aisle.
She didn't look at him. She was looking at the boy's thumb on the Velcro. Rrrip. Press. Rrrip. The sound was like a fingernail drawn along the inside of her own head, and she would never afterward be able to say exactly what made her do it, except that her hand moved before the rest of her had finished deciding, the way a hand moves to catch a falling glass.
She reached across the table and took the folder.