Vanessa Sterling frowned, her painted eyebrows arching in sudden, sharp disgust as she looked at my worn boots and Mason’s sneakers:
“Tyler?”
Vanessa scoffed, her voice dripping with aristocratic irritation: “Who is this woman?
Who let these economy passengers into the forward galley while we’re deplaning?”
Tyler didn’t answer his mistress.
His hands began to shake with that violent, uncoordinated palsy of a corporate embezzler who has just heard the hydraulic door of a bank vault lock from the outside.
His throat clicked in spastic convulsions:
“C…
Clara…?”
Tyler stammered, stepping backward half an inch, his spine hitting the cockpit security doorframe:
“You… you were on this flight…?!
You were in the back…?!”
“We were in seat Twenty-Four-B, Tyler,” I spoke softly.
My voice had no civilian wife’s tremor left.
It carried forty decibels of compressed, sub-zero polar diamond that made the flight attendant in the galley drop her tongs:
