It was this.

It was the clean cooperative competence of two people with their hands full and their lives in the balance, trusting each other because there was no time not to.

She had told herself for a year and a half that she had left the sky because the sky had taken someone from her.

Sitting in that right seat with a storm coming up fast, she understood that she had really left because she could not forgive the sky, and that forgiveness and competence were not the same thing, and that tonight only one of them was going to get this airplane down.

It was a strange and clarifying thing to understand about yourself in the middle of an emergency, and she would turn it over for months afterward.