Where are we going, she asked, meaning it as the operational question it was, not as despair.

Davis named a diversion airport on the northern coast of Spain, closer than Madrid, with a runway long enough and a storm sitting right on top of it.

It was the right call and they both knew it and they both knew what it would cost in difficulty.

She ran the picture forward in her mind the way she had been trained to, not toward disaster but toward the sequence of things that would have to go right, the descent through weather, the approach in a crosswind, the landing with a crew of one and a half and an airplane that had already shown it could not be entirely trusted.

She did not let herself think the other thought, the one circling at the edge of the cold clear place, which was that she had been here before, in a sky that had turned against a pilot through no fault of the pilot’s, and that the last time she had been here a man she loved had not come home.