You proved you were superior. Look where it got us. Before she could respond, her phone began to buzz. Not once, continuously. A cascade of notifications that sounded like a flock of panicked birds.
A text from a friend in Greenwich. Caroline. Are you seeing this? Turn on the news now. She fumbled with her phone, her hands trembling in a way she couldn't control.
She opened a news app. The headline filled her screen. JFK flight cancelled. 312 stranded after CEO terminates 28 million airline contract over racist incident. Her blood turned to ice.
She clicked the link. The story was everywhere. It had metastasized across the internet with the speed of a virus in a closed system. Tweets and posts from passengers who had been on the plane quoted the captain's announcement verbatim. They described the blonde woman in first class who had started it all.
They posted screenshots from Sophia Reyes's live stream. They used words like disgusting and appalling and this is what privilege looks like. And then she saw it. A photo grainy taken from a phone shot from the angle of seat 3J. It showed her standing in the aisle, arms crossed, face contorted in a sneer, arguing with the flight crew.
Behind her, Mark's mortified face. Across the aisle, the composed profile of Dr. Naomi Blackwell sitting in her seat reading her tablet. The photo was everywhere. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit. Her face, her expensive scarf, her expression of entitled contempt frozen in pixels and distributed to millions.
Within minutes, the internet's forensic machinery went to work. Her name, Caroline Davenport, was identified and trending. Then came her husband's company, Davenport and Associates Realy. Then her country club. Then the charity board she chaired. then her address.
Then her stylist's Instagram, which she had tagged in a photo that morning, captioned, "Epport ready," with three champagne emojis. Her world so carefully curated, so meticulously maintained, was being dismantled post by post, comment by comment, share by share. The hashtag flightar 714 was the number one trending topic in the United States. The door to the resolution office opened. A different airline representative entered.