Elijah walked forward, used the bathroom, and returned.
When he sat down, he looked at Naomi.
"That was easy."
Naomi swallowed.
"It should be."
He opened his book.
Five minutes later he was explaining galaxies to his grandmother.
Naomi turned toward the window so nobody would see her cry.
In Chicago, they saw the Bean.
Elijah declared it smaller than expected and more reflective than expected, which Naomi said sounded scientifically balanced.
They ate pizza too thick to satisfy Naomi's definition of pizza. They visited the planetarium. Elijah spent twenty minutes arguing with an interactive display because he believed one animation oversimplified gravitational lensing.
For three days, he was mostly a child again.
On the flight home, he fell asleep before takeoff.
That mattered more to Naomi than any industry award.
The reforms at Skyward continued while the family healed.
Not all of them worked as planned.
The new protected reporting line initially received so many low-level complaints that investigators struggled to separate serious retaliation allegations from ordinary workplace conflict. Skyward hired more staff and created triage standards.
One branch manager attempted to improve his numbers by pressuring employees not to label incidents as bias-related until after local review.
The audit office caught the pattern.
He received discipline and retraining.
Naomi used the case in leadership meetings.
"Metrics create behavior," she said. "If the number becomes the goal, people will manage the number instead of the problem."
Quarterly transparency reports produced another unexpected result.
Complaint numbers went up.
Several board members panicked.
"The public will think service is getting worse," one said.
Naomi disagreed.
"Or people finally believe reporting might matter."
Substantiated complaints rose slightly too, then stabilized.
That did not prove discrimination had increased.
It proved the company was looking harder.
Over time, repeat complaints against the same employee fell.
Intervention reports from crew increased.
Retaliation allegations were investigated faster.
Passenger satisfaction recovered gradually.
The most encouraging statistic was not a score Naomi had originally considered.
Time to acknowledgement.
Before Flight 2447, passengers waited an average of seventeen days to receive a meaningful response to serious dignity complaints.
Within a year, that dropped to forty-eight hours.
Janet Williams noticed.
She became a volunteer advisor to Skyward's passenger panel, not an employee and not a spokesperson.
At her first meeting, she said, "You cannot always fix what happened. But you can stop making people wonder whether anybody heard them."
That sentence joined the one above Naomi's desk.
Marcus eventually accepted a promotion into inflight services training.
Not because he had intervened once.
Because his work over the following year showed he could teach intervention without turning it into performance.
During one class, a trainee asked what courage felt like in the moment.
Marcus laughed.