Margaret turned her head.

Across the aisle, in the front row on the other side, Nathan Brooks was already looking at them.

He had been looking at them, she realized, for some time.

She held his eyes for three seconds.

And in those three seconds Margaret Collins, who had spent thirty-one years reading faces across a triage desk, watched a man’s expression run through an entire sequence — concern, calculation, and something underneath both that she had seen perhaps a dozen times in her career and had learned to take extremely seriously.

He stood up.