"What's your name?" Margaret asked, although she could read the badge perfectly.
"Chloe Anderson."
"Thank you, Chloe. I'll remember it."
Chloe smiled, barely. She left a small folded napkin beside the water, the ordinary paper square used with beverage service. Margaret noticed handwriting in blue ink along one corner after the attendant had moved away. It read: "If you need assistance, press the button. I'll answer." The words were plain and perhaps foolish for Chloe to put in writing, but Margaret folded the napkin into her book as carefully as if it were a valuable document.
Thomas drank half his water. "She's nice," he said.
"Yes," Margaret replied. "She is."
"That supervisor doesn't seem to think so."
"Sometimes the person most determined to enforce a rule is the one least interested in what the rule is for."
Thomas considered the sentence while replacing the cap on his bottle. He told Margaret that during his first year as a teacher, he had been disciplined for allowing a student to practice in an empty classroom during lunch. The principal said the student had not followed the proper reservation process. Later they discovered the boy had nowhere quiet to practice at home, and the school changed the rule. Margaret asked whether the principal ever apologized.
"Eventually," Thomas said. "After someone important complained."
Margaret smiled without humor. "It's astonishing how quickly some people develop sympathy after they receive permission from authority."
Near the front of the aircraft, Grant Miller was not developing sympathy. He watched Chloe finish her conversation with the passengers in thirty-eight and made a note on his tablet: "Crew member departed assigned service plan without permission." The wording was deliberately broad. It could mean almost anything; that was why he liked it.
When she returned to the galley, he took her aside. "You have now challenged a direct instruction twice."
"I brought them water and a blanket. A passenger had been frightened during turbulence."
"Your job is not to decide whether my instructions deserve to be followed."
"Our training says passenger calls must be addressed when it is safe to do so."
"Our training also says follow the purser."
"Not when an instruction conflicts with a safety duty."
He leaned closer, lowering his voice until she could smell the mint on his breath. "You think the company will choose a probationary attendant over someone who has managed premium cabins for twenty-four years?"
Chloe held his gaze. "I think that shouldn't be how they decide what's true."
Miller's face hardened. He stepped aside and indicated the crew jump seat, dismissing her with a gesture so practiced it seemed rehearsed. She sat down, opened her pocket notebook, and recorded the time of the seat move, the verbal instruction, the unanswered call button, and the service she had provided after the turbulence. She did not put down what she believed Miller intended. She wrote only what she had seen and heard.