He also knew she was suggesting travel partly to protect him from the guilt she could see building behind his eyes. "Let's not decide tonight," he answered.
Jessica Riley arrived in Houston after midnight on a company flight from Dallas. Her assistant had prepared a folder containing the couple's reservation, the captain's initial report, the purser's summary, and the maintenance of relevant electronic records. The reports were startlingly inconsistent. In the captain's version, the passengers had become aggressive when challenged over a ticketing irregularity. In the reservation history, no irregularity existed. In Mark's report, the couple had refused to provide verification; in Evan's gate record, they had produced the original purchase email in addition to valid passes.
Jessica entered the office alone. She was in her early fifties, with dark hair pulled into a neat knot and the careful composure of an executive who had learned that every sentence spoken during a crisis might later matter. She introduced herself and thanked the couple for agreeing to speak with her. Daniel told her they were willing to explain what happened, but he would not discuss investigations in his official capacity. Alana watched Jessica's face carefully, measuring whether the executive understood the difference between an apology and an attempt to regain control of a threatening situation.
"I have reviewed your reservation," Jessica began. "There was no duplicate assignment, no ticketing fraud alert, and no issue with payment. The records support what you told our crew." Daniel nodded once. "Then we agree on the facts of the ticketing question."
She swallowed. "Yes. We do."
Jessica offered a direct apology for the treatment they had received. She did not mention their professional titles until after she had acknowledged that ordinary passengers would have had an equal right to be treated fairly. "No one should have been required to establish their worthiness to sit in a seat that we sold them," she said. "I cannot undo tonight. I can tell you we have begun a formal review, and we intend to preserve the evidence and hear from everyone involved." Alana studied her for several seconds, then thanked her for saying the part about ordinary passengers first.
"We've spent most of our careers examining human error," Alana said. "People make mistakes. They forget steps. They misunderstand a situation and sometimes feel embarrassed when they're corrected. This wasn't one ordinary mistake, though. Your crew had repeated chances to stop and verify the facts, and every time the facts contradicted their assumption, they made the assumption harder."
Jessica wrote the sentence down. She knew enough about human performance to recognize a description of confirmation bias, but hearing it from the person who had endured the consequences gave the term a different weight.
Daniel asked whether the airline had records of similar complaints. Jessica hesitated and said she could not answer responsibly without examining them. "Then examine them," he replied. He did not raise his voice, and the words were not delivered as a demand from a regulator. They were spoken by a man who had just watched an institutional process fail while every person responsible insisted that the process was working.