“Ma’am, you need to return to your seat immediately, we’re preparing for departure —”

“Tell Captain Luca Vance,” I said, “that his wife, Jessi Sterling, is standing outside this door.”

My voice was not loud.

But something in it made the attendant go still.

“And tell him,” I continued, in the same low, level tone, “that his seven-year-old son is sitting in seat 28E, with a drawing he made for him.”

The color left the attendant’s face.

She looked from my expression — which I could feel had gone stone-still and cold — to the cockpit door, and then she stepped to the interphone and pressed the chime, and her voice shook into the handset.