Ask her sometime what happened to her wingman. He’d said it like a man laying down a winning card.

And the terrible thing was that for one vertiginous second, standing there, the old reflex answered him — yes, ask me, because it was my fault, because I was there and I couldn’t stop it. Eighteen months of that answer, carved so deep it fired before I could think.

I didn’t know yet how wrong it was.

I didn’t know that the man being folded into the back of a police car had, with his own signature, arranged both the death I blamed myself for and the near-death I’d just flown three hundred people out of.

All I knew, in the galley, was that a stranger in handcuffs knew the exact shape of the wound I’d spent a year and a half hiding, and had chosen to press his thumb into it on his way to prison.