Walter lifted his eyes over his glasses. "I was sitting next to them. Nice children. Very polite. The sort you meet and immediately wish they weren't having such a difficult birthday. Thought you might want to know."
He returned to his puzzle, leaving the couple with that information. Celeste pressed a napkin over her mouth. Richard looked down at the watch on his wrist and noticed that the second hand was moving with the same precision it always had, indifferent to all the time he had already wasted.
Eventually Celeste took a clean napkin from the seat pocket and borrowed a pen from Walter. She wrote a few words, crossed out half of them, then began again. She wanted to apologize for the seats, the Thanksgiving dinner, the years of silence, and the fact that she had recognized her granddaughters only after helping humiliate them. None of those things fitted neatly onto a square of airline linen.
She settled on something smaller. May I please speak with you, even for one minute? I am so sorry. Mom.
When Jenna passed, Celeste held out the folded note. "Would you give this to the man in two C? Please. He doesn't have to answer."
Jenna read neither the outside nor the contents. She took it forward and delivered it to Daniel, who unfolded it carefully and looked at the familiar handwriting. The word Mom rested at the bottom like the name of a person from another lifetime.
He read the note twice. For a moment he remembered being seven, waiting at the front door of the Ashford house while Celeste buttoned his coat for school. He remembered her putting a hand against his forehead when he was sick and singing a tune without words to help him fall asleep. The memories made her silence at Thanksgiving more painful, not less, because he knew she was capable of tenderness when it did not require her to contradict Richard.
"Please tell her not now," Daniel said. "Kindly, if you can."
Jenna nodded. She understood something about the request that Sloan had failed to understand about the seat change: a person could need time without being unkind. Back in the rear, she delivered Daniel's answer without offering an interpretation or pressing Celeste for a response. Celeste folded the napkin and put it into her handbag beside a lipstick she would not use again that day.
A little later Richard unfastened his seat belt and walked toward the front, ostensibly to use the working lavatory. He passed the row where he had sat in first class and stopped beside Daniel. The twins looked up, and Ruby immediately stiffened, her expression as clear as a warning sign.
"Daniel," Richard said. "A word."
Daniel checked that Derek Hale was nearby and told the girls he would be standing a few steps ahead. He did not want to give his father the satisfaction of a dramatic scene, but he was equally unwilling to let the conversation turn into a spectacle for two children who had already endured enough. He stood near the galley, where the noise of the aircraft provided a little privacy.