Chapter 1 — Seat 8A

I had picked the seat for exactly one reason: no one talks to you in 8A on an overnight flight.

Window side, one neighbor, cabin lights down within the hour.

You put your forehead against the cold plastic and the whole world agrees to leave you alone until Madrid.

That was all I wanted anymore.

To be left alone.

The wanting had a date on it.

Eighteen months earlier I had been a different person entirely — a squadron leader, a name people said with a certain weight, a woman who woke up every morning sure of exactly what she was for.

And then, in the space of about ninety seconds on a clear training day, I had watched my wingman’s aircraft fail and fall, and I had not been able to stop it, and something in me that had never once faltered simply switched off and did not come back on.

I flew a desk for a few weeks because they made me.

Then I resigned, and I gave away the uniform, and I built myself the smallest possible life out of window seats and closed books and cities where no one knew my face.

I was thirty-eight years old in a plain green sweater with a blanket over my knees and a book I had no intention of opening, and to every other soul on that airplane I was nothing at all — a tired woman who’d asked for a cup of water and waved off the meal.

There is a particular freedom in being underestimated, and I had spent a year and a half learning to live inside it like a person moving into a smaller house.

None of them knew that I had once been one of the most decorated fighter pilots in the United States Air Force.

None of them knew about the F-16s, or the missions where a decision took less than a second and cost more than a life, or the morning I walked away from all of it and swore I would never again be the person everyone turns to when they’re afraid.

I had gotten good at forgetting, on flights like this one.

The engines make a sound at altitude, a steady white roar, and if you let it, it empties your head.

I let it.