"Both feelings make sense," Dr. Ellis told him. Caleb looked relieved.
He had been worried that saying he disliked the videos would make him ungrateful to the people who helped. She explained that people could do something important and still create unexpected difficulties. Together they made a list of situations in which he could tell an adult that he wanted privacy. The list went into the same red backpack that had been beneath seat 2A.
The summer arrived, and with it the prospect of another flight. Caleb had not decided whether he wanted to travel by air again. Nina offered to drive to Los Angeles over several days if that felt better, though her advisers pointed out how much longer it would take. Caleb asked whether they could take a train. They spent an afternoon looking at routes and schedules, enjoying the idea of watching the landscape change slowly outside a window.
One evening he surprised her by saying he did want to fly again eventually. He did not want Karen's behavior to take away something he had once enjoyed. Nina told him there was no deadline. She also promised they would choose travel arrangements based on what made him feel safe, not what would make a good photograph or a reassuring headline. Caleb nodded, then returned to reading about spacecraft. His choice was still forming, and she intended to let him own it.
When the independent oversight team released VeraJet's first progress update, the results were mixed. Training completion rates were improving, but some stations still had problems communicating child handoff information. The new escalation system had been used several times, including one case in which a junior attendant correctly questioned a supervisor's proposed removal of a passenger with a disability. Complaints had not vanished, and the review cautioned against interpreting short-term changes as proof that discrimination had disappeared. Martin publicly accepted the criticism and funded additional implementation work.
The update received a fraction of the attention the incident had generated. There were no dramatic videos, no billionaires announcing immediate victories, and no applause breaking out in an airport terminal. There were records to correct, staff to train, and people checking whether promises matched practice. Nina found the unglamorous nature of the work reassuring. It suggested that the story was finally becoming something other than a spectacle.
Caleb's own contribution arrived unexpectedly on a sheet of lined paper. He was sitting at the kitchen table one Saturday afternoon when Nina noticed he had been writing for almost an hour. She asked whether it was schoolwork. He shook his head and covered the page with one hand, embarrassed. A few minutes later he brought it to her and said he wanted to write something about the flight, but he did not want to stand in front of cameras to read it.