Behind the locked door, three hundred people who had spent forty minutes not knowing if they’d live made a sound I will never forget — a ragged, rising wave of cheering and crying and prayer let go all at once.

Reeves sat back for a second and let out a breath that seemed to empty him entirely, and then he reached over without a word and gripped my forearm, hard, the way pilots do when there aren’t words that fit.

I gripped his back.

We had known each other for forty minutes.

We had also, in those forty minutes, done the most intimate thing two strangers can do, which is hold three hundred lives level between four hands and not drop them.

I have friends of twenty years I don’t know the way I knew Nathaniel Reeves by the time that airplane stopped rolling.