the person ahead of him without asking. He had learned how much energy it cost to prove something that was already true. Tonight, he told himself, he did not owe a stranger a demonstration of his résumé. He raised his champagne and asked Alana whether she was ready to enjoy the first evening of their vacation.
She touched her glass to his. "To fifteen years," she said.
"And to spending the next fifteen doing more things just because we want to." Daniel smiled. "To that." They drank, but Alana noticed that his eyes followed Karen toward the galley. She knew the difference between her husband's professional concentration and the quiet vigilance he sometimes carried into places that were supposed to be restful.
Karen stopped beside Mark Jensen, the purser supervising the forward cabin. Mark had served in premium cabins long enough to treat his own preferences as traditions, and his long seniority made newer colleagues reluctant to question him. He leaned toward Karen as she spoke, glanced at the seats, and narrowed his eyes. Alana saw the exchange too. Neither she nor Daniel could hear the words, but both recognized the unmistakable motion of people discussing someone who did not know they were being discussed.
"We should say something now," Alana whispered. Daniel watched Mark glance at a handheld service device. "We should give them one opportunity to do their jobs," he replied. She nodded, not because she agreed that the behavior was harmless, but because she respected his wish to keep one afternoon of their anniversary free from confrontation. They turned back toward their Paris guidebook, although the easy happiness they had carried through the gate had already begun to fade.
In the galley, Mark asked Karen what had attracted her attention. She told him the couple in the second row "didn't seem right" and that their passes might reflect a last-minute seat assignment. There was no actual alert on her device. Mark asked whether she had checked the manifest, and she answered that she had not needed to because she had a strong feeling. He should have stopped there, opened the passenger list, and discovered that his employee's suspicion had no foundation. Instead, he glanced toward the Harris couple and told Karen he would handle it.
Mark's own record contained warnings no passenger could have known about. Twice in the previous year, a customer had complained that he treated them differently after questioning whether they belonged in the premium cabin. Both complaints had been closed by a supervisor who accepted Mark's explanation that he was protecting service standards. The company measured cabin satisfaction carefully, but it did not compare how frequently particular passengers were asked to produce extra documentation after boarding. The absence of that comparison had allowed Mark to interpret a lack of formal discipline as proof that he was always right.