Kevin because he had threatened her career, she answered that she had been frightened and angry but that those feelings did not change the timestamps. The attorney asked whether a system could be wrong, and she said of course it could, which was why she had insisted on comparing multiple sources instead of trusting a single screen.
Lisa testified about the boarding encounter, Ryan's pressure, and the false intoxication report. She was nervous when she entered the courtroom and more nervous when she saw Kevin looking at her from the defense table. The prosecutor asked why she had offered Arthur slippers, and she explained that he was sitting barefoot with sore feet and she had the supplies available to help. The defense suggested that refusing footwear justified the entire denial; Lisa replied that Arthur had offered to comply before boarding and that the refusal had already been framed as a matter of who belonged in first class, not a consistent safety rule.
When she left the witness stand, Lisa felt as though her bones had been emptied. Teresa met her outside the courtroom with a bottle of water and the promise of dinner, but Lisa could not speak about the testimony for nearly an hour. She had not expected telling the truth to be so tiring, or for opposing counsel to make kindness seem like poor judgment. Arthur sent a brief message through the approved witness-support channel thanking her for accuracy rather than for loyalty, and she appreciated the difference.
Margaret's testimony came later. She brought the original confirmation, the complaint responses, the records of her attempts to rebook, and the telephone message her brother had left while she waited at the airport. She could not describe the funeral service because she had not been there to witness it, and that absence was the heart of the injury she could not fully put into words. When asked what she wanted from the proceedings, she said she wanted the court to understand that a reservation is not just a number to the person who is trying to reach someone they love.
The judge allowed relevant facts and excluded arguments that would have turned her grief into spectacle. Margaret was asked difficult questions about whether another flight had been available and whether she could have obtained transportation by other means. She answered honestly that she had tried, that the options she was given were unaffordable or too late, and that she had been told by the airline itself that her reservation was gone because of a request she never made. Her testimony did not ask anyone to convict the defendants out of sympathy; it described how the false record affected a real decision.
Arthur attended the hearing quietly, sitting behind Margaret's lawyer rather than at the front with the prosecutors. He remembered a young employee at the airline's first counter who had once asked Helen whether a passenger was worth helping if the transaction lost money. Helen had answered that a passenger wasn't a transaction and that the airline would not survive if people forgot the difference. Arthur looked at Margaret, then at Lisa and Anna seated together in the gallery, and wished he had kept that sentence alive with more than memories.