"Examples are for training videos," Grant said. "I fly enough. I don't need my face on another one."
Felicia almost smiled. "Door closed clean that day. Captain said you made the divert fuel call early enough that nobody scrambled."
"That's the job."
"It is," she said. "Doesn't mean the other thing wasn't the job too—sitting there while someone tried to unseat you with her mouth."
Grant looked at her then. Felicia had the kind of eyes that had seen too many cabins to romanticize any of them. "I stayed quiet because I was tired," he said. "And because arguing in public with a stranger about my right to a seat is a tax I refuse to keep paying on demand. When you called my name for the door, that was enough truth for the room."
"It was," Felicia said. "For the room. For her, maybe not. That's her problem."
"That's her problem," Grant agreed.
They stood together for another minute
In the days after the flight, Felicia mentioned the incident only once more, to a trusted colleague on a crew layover, and even then without names. "Woman tried to check a Black passenger's ticket with her mouth," she said. "Turns out ops needed him for the door." The colleague winced, sighed, and said, "Every week." They drank water in a hotel lobby and talked about schedules instead, because dwelling was a luxury that turned into bitterness if you weren't careful. Felicia kept Grant's preference against spectacle. Loyalty, for her, looked like not turning someone's dignity into a crew-room legend with too many embellishments.
watching a line of storms invent itself over Alabama. Then Felicia had a flight to work, and Grant had a conference call, and the ordinary machinery of the airline took them both back.
***