She did not need to prove anything in the air anymore.

She had sat in a right-hand seat over Spain with her son asleep behind her and done the most important flying of her life precisely by not needing to be the hero of it, and a person who has learned that lesson does not go looking for a cockpit in which to unlearn it.

On her first morning in the classroom she set her old flight helmet on the podium, scuffed and sun-faded and heavier with meaning than the young student pilots could yet understand, and she let them look at it, because they were going to ask, and because the asking was the lesson.

They sat up straight, eager, half of them expecting war stories, the clean exciting kind with a hero at the center.