“Captain.

There is an urgent matter in the forward galley.

Your… your wife, Jessi, is here.” And the silence that came back down that line was the loudest silence I have ever heard.

I stood in that galley, in the recirculated air and the smell of coffee, and I waited for the door of my husband’s cockpit to open, and I understood that I already knew everything I needed to know, and that whatever he said when it opened would only be him trying to talk his way out of a truth that had already been broadcast, in his own voice, to two hundred people, including his son.

Chapter 10 — The Smirk Vanished