"Did you know about the security advisory?"
"No. I learned something was wrong when Trent took the man away. Everybody started looking frightened, and I didn't know what they had been told. I remember thinking it was convenient for Preston that the passenger he disliked had become a suspect." She covered her face for a moment. "I should have trusted that thought enough to ask a question."
Miles did not hear most of these statements until months later. On that first evening, he sat in an airport office with an ice pack against his wrist and called his mother. He had already missed the birthday dinner, and the phone rang so many times that he began to fear she was watching news reports instead of waiting beside her cake.
"Miles?" Lillian Sloan answered. "Baby, where are you? The airport says your flight diverted. Your Aunt Denise has been refreshing the news every five minutes. Tell me you're all right."
"I'm safe, Mama. I'm in Albuquerque. There was a security issue and the plane landed here."
"Are you hurt?"
He looked at the ice pack. "A little sore. Nothing that needs a hospital tonight."
There was a silence, then the sound of her chair scraping against the kitchen floor. "Don't use that voice with me," she said. "That's the voice you use when something terrible happened and you're trying not to scare me. What did they do?"
Miles closed his eyes. There was no way to explain it without making his mother imagine him on the floor of an airplane, restrained while strangers applauded. He told her anyway, carefully and in the order it had happened. When he reached the part about his grandfather's badge, her breath caught audibly. The sound hurt him more than the pressure marks on his wrists.
"They took Daddy's badge?" she asked.
"Molly got it back. It's right here. Nobody damaged it."
"And they did all that without knowing who you were."
"Yes, Mama."
"Would knowing have changed it?"
"I think it would have." He looked at the dark reflection in the airport window. "That's part of what's wrong."
Lillian was quiet for a long time. When she spoke again, the steadiness in her voice reminded him of Isaiah Sloan standing beside a train with tired feet and a perfectly straight back. "You come home when you can. The cake can wait. I don't need you here on the clock. I need you here safe."
Miles touched the pocket where the badge rested. "I'll get there, Mama. I promise."
The arrests did not happen in one dramatic line of handcuffs across the aircraft aisle. Investigators first secured the genuine threat, established where the suspicious material had been found, and protected the statements of everyone who had handled or witnessed it. Leland Crane was taken into federal custody without an explanation to the passengers about the full scope of the investigation. The object beneath 21C was sealed for examination, and his belongings were treated as evidence rather than curiosities to be displayed for the cabin.