"A seat is a seat. Enjoy it while you've got it." Her voice changed, becoming quieter. "You're bringing it, right? Your grandpa's badge?"
Miles reached into the inside pocket of his charcoal travel jacket. He touched the small cloth pouch containing a brass railroad badge, polished at the edges by decades of use, and felt the raised letters beneath the fabric. "It's right here. I want you to hold it on your birthday. I had the old pin repaired, too."
"Your grandpa never sat down once on those trains, baby," she said. "Thirty years serving the front car. First on his feet when a passenger needed help, last off when something went wrong."
"I know, Mama." Miles watched a ground worker guide a catering truck toward the fuselage. "That's why I always do."
His grandfather, Isaiah Sloan, had worked passenger trains long enough to recognize regular customers by the sound of their footsteps. He had carried luggage for wealthy families who never learned his name, steadied elderly travelers over narrow vestibules, and given up his own rest so frightened children could sit with someone who promised the train was safe. In the family photographs, he stood straight in a dark uniform, the brass badge pinned above his heart, the service smile present even when exhaustion showed in his eyes. The smile had never meant he accepted the way people spoke to him. It meant he understood that other people's dignity was worth protecting even when they failed to protect his.
When Miles was eleven, his grandfather had taken him to a railroad museum outside Baltimore. They spent an entire afternoon among retired passenger coaches, reading small metal plaques while schoolchildren ran from exhibit to exhibit. Isaiah stopped beside the front car of a restored train and asked Miles what made a good conductor. The boy had offered several answers about schedules, tickets, and uniforms, but his grandfather shook his head at each one. "You keep everybody safe," he finally said, "including the ones who think your job makes you less than they are. Especially when they don't deserve your patience."
Miles had remembered those words through college, through his early work as an aircraft maintenance engineer, and through a career that drew him toward difficult questions people preferred not to ask. Airplanes were magnificent machines, but the business of keeping them safe involved people who made choices while tired, distracted, frightened, proud, or convinced of their own infallibility. By the time he became Executive Director of Flight Standards at the Federal Aviation Administration, he had learned that a regulation mattered only as much as the judgment of the person expected to follow it. Titles could open doors. They could also prevent someone from admitting a door needed repair.
He was deliberately not wearing that title at the airport. His government identification was secured separately from the railroad badge, and the navy sweater in his carry-on was the nicest thing he had packed. He had taken real leave for once, blocking his calendar after his deputy reminded him that his mother had already celebrated two birthdays with a video call and one with a voicemail. This year he had promised to be there before the candles were lit. He intended to keep that promise, and not even an urgent audit in Denver was supposed to interfere.