Then she went to check the galley to make sure the thing was actually on board because Dileia Marsh had learned a long time ago that a note in a system and a physical object in a cart are two completely different categories of thing. It was there a single slice chocolate with a strawberry on top in a plastic clamshell with a handwritten label. She stood in the galley for a second with it in her hand and then she went and did the pre-eparture walkthrough and she was polite and efficient and entirely normal. And nobody on that aircraft had the faintest idea that the flight attendant working the forward cabin had spent 3 years unable to sleep properly because of something she had not done on a completely different airplane. Margarite Vance boarded in group one and settled into 3F with the particular efficiency of a woman who has done this several hundred times.
She was 58. She wore a cream cashmere sweater she had owned for 11 years and maintained obsessively and pearls that had been her mother's and two thin bracelets that had not been anyone's. She traveled nine or 10 times a year, mostly to see a son in another state who took her calls but did not return them. And she paid for exactly one upgrade per trip, which she budgeted for the way other people budget for a car payment. Nobody who met her in that cabin would have guessed any of that.
That was the entire point of the cabin. She noticed the children immediately. Two of them, small, nine or 10, in pink dresses with bows. No adult. She scanned the surrounding rose twice, looking for the parent and did not find one and something in her chest tightened in a way she would not have been able to explain and would have been offended to have described to her.
She looked at their seats. She looked at her own. She did the arithmetic she always did. And then she opened a magazine and did not look at them again for 2 hours and 11 minutes and would later tell three different people with total sincerity that she had not thought about those girls once until the dessert service. That was a lie.
It was not a lie she knew she was telling. Kestrelair A12 pushed back at 3:14 and was airborne by 3:31. For the first hour, it was the most ordinary flight in North America. Zuri watched the ground go away with her forehead against the window and provided continuous narration nobody had asked for. That's a lake.
That's a different lake. That's a road with nothing on it. She had brought a book and did not open it once. Immani read for 40 minutes, then stopped, then spent a while looking at the seat pocket card with the emergency exits on it, memorizing them because she was a child who memorized emergency exits. At 3:52, Dileia came through with drinks.
"Ladies, what are we having?" "Ginger ale," said Zuri immediately. "Ginger ale," said Immani, 2 seconds later, which is how 90% of their decisions had gone since birth. "Delia put down two cups and two napkins, and without making anything of it, crouched slightly at the aisle, so she was closer to their level than above it. "Your mom put a note on this flight," she said.
"Do you know about that?" Zuri sat up like a fired shot. "Is it the cake?" "Zuri," said Ammani. "She said maybe."
She said, "Maybe." "So, is it?" Zuri demanded. Dileia's face did something professional and warm at the same time. "I'm not confirming anything.