For months, I had approached that subject as a student conducting research.
Now it felt personal in a way I hadn't anticipated.
I thought about how quickly Victoria had decided I was suspicious.
She hadn't asked whether I was having a problem.
She hadn't offered assistance.
She had looked at my appearance and concluded that I didn't belong.
Then she had acted as though the conclusion itself was evidence.
But what frightened me even more was Caroline Pike.
Victoria was one passenger.
An unpleasant, entitled stranger whose behavior had shocked an entire cabin.
Caroline was different.
She had access to the airline's system.
Her decisions became records.
Her entries could influence how other employees treated a passenger.
And she had apparently accepted Victoria's suspicion as sufficient reason to create an official warning about me.
That was the part I couldn't stop thinking about.
I opened my research notes.
There was an interview I'd conducted months earlier with a student who had been denied access to a financial assistance program because of a clerical error. The student had spent weeks trying to correct the mistake, only to discover that an employee had entered an incorrect eligibility code.
The person responsible probably hadn't intended serious harm.
But the incorrect record created problems that followed the student from one office to another.
I had written in my notes:
An unverified assumption can become an administrative fact when nobody checks the source.
I stared at the sentence.
Then I closed my laptop.
For the first time, I understood how terrifying that could feel from the other side of the desk.
My mother knocked gently on the connecting door.
"Can I come in?"
I looked up.
"Sure."
She entered carrying a cup of tea.
She had changed out of her burgundy suit and was wearing a simple gray sweater. Without the formal clothes and carefully arranged hair, she looked more like the mother who used to sit beside my bed when I was sick than the senator people recognized at airports.
She placed the tea on the table.
"How are you doing?"
I shrugged.
"Okay."
She raised one eyebrow.
"That's the third time you've said that."