"I want another adult here."
"I want my mom."
Naomi worried that teaching him these sentences would make the world seem dangerous.
Lila disagreed.
"The world already showed him danger," she said. "We're teaching him he has options inside it."
That reframing helped Naomi, too.
Her own anger had become less explosive and more durable.
At first she had wanted every reform implemented immediately. Every complaint reopened. Every manager retrained. Every failure exposed.
Then she saw what rushed reform could do.
One regional office began over-escalating routine disagreements because managers feared being accused of minimizing bias. Minor service complaints that should have been resolved with a conversation were being sent to corporate ethics. Employees became anxious about saying anything imperfect. Some started avoiding passengers who seemed angry because they feared a complaint.
Naomi stopped the rollout in that region for two weeks.
"Accountability is not panic," she told the leadership team. "If people become so afraid of making a mistake that they stop using judgment, we have created another unsafe system."
Training was adjusted.
Bias indicators were not treated as proof. Context mattered. Repeated patterns mattered. Intent mattered for some decisions, impact for others. Safety rules remained enforceable. Passengers could still be removed when conduct justified it.
The goal was not to make employees powerless.
It was to make power reviewable.
Marcus helped build the intervention curriculum.
He was initially uncomfortable when headquarters asked him to join the project.
"I don't want this to turn into me being the good Black flight attendant in every training video," he told Naomi.
"Neither do I."
"Then why me?"
"Because you identified the real problem. You said you weren't braver than Paige. You were less afraid of retaliation. I want that insight in the training."
Marcus agreed on the condition that Paige participate, too.
When Naomi asked why, he said, "Because people need to see what freezing looks like and how to recover from it. Most employees are more likely to be Paige than me."
Paige agreed.
Their training scenario became one of Skyward's most useful.
A senior crew member speaks harshly to a passenger. A junior employee notices. The senior employee dismisses concern. What can the junior employee say without escalating the whole cabin?
The answer was not a heroic speech.
It was a sequence.
"I need a second set of eyes here."
"Let's pause and verify the seat information."
"I'll take over this interaction while you reset."
"Captain, I need support with a passenger-contact concern."
Then documentation.
Then protected reporting.
Simple enough to remember under stress.
Six weeks after Flight 2447, Skyward published Judge Park's report with names redacted where legally required but findings intact.
The report was one hundred eighty-six pages.
Most people never read it.
Journalists did.
So did other airlines.
The report concluded that Rebecca's conduct involved race-based stereotyping, unnecessary physical handling of a child, and repeated misuse of crew authority. It concluded that Dennis's involvement created an unmanaged conflict of interest that materially compromised complaint review. It also concluded that Skyward's incentive structure and escalation design allowed repeat conduct to remain fragmented across separate files.
The most important line appeared halfway through the executive summary.
"The institution did not lack rules. It lacked reliable mechanisms for making those rules matter when enforcement was inconvenient."
Naomi kept that line pinned above her desk.
Skyward announced a three-year reform plan.
Independent passenger-dignity office.
Conflict-of-interest routing.