Chapter 6 - An Opening in the Fortress
The moment his heavy leather loafer cleared the row, Margaret did something she had not been able to do for three hours and twelve minutes.
She moved.
Slowly, carefully, she extended her left leg into the open space of the middle seat’s footwell. The movement was accompanied by an audible, dry click from her pelvic joint. A sharp gasp escaped her lips as the blood rushed back into the starved capillaries of her foot, bringing with it a fierce, prickling wave of heat that made her toes curl inside her canvas shoes.
She rotated her ankle once, twice, three times, listening to the soft creak of her tendons releasing. She placed both hands flat against the base of her spine and arched backward against the seat cushion, feeling the agonizing pressure on her sciatic nerve unlock like a rusty hinge.
The physical relief was so intense, so sweet, that for a single heartbeat she felt like weeping.
She took a long, clean breath of the pressurized air, filling her lungs to their very bottom. The space around her felt vast, miraculous, an ocean of unencumbered oxygen. For three hours, she had been compressed into a corner like an unwanted parcel; now, with his absence, the natural proportions of the world returned.
She looked at the empty middle seat beside her.
The blue patterned fabric of seat 24B was indented, retaining the heavy, aggressive contour of his body. The shared armrest between them was still knocked slightly off-kilter from his weight. On the carpet below, his empty water bottle lay on its side, rolling lazily with the tilt of the aircraft, while his expensive leather shoulder bag remained slumped against the seat stanchion, its heavy nylon strap spilling across the carpet.
Margaret stared at the seat.
“You’re tiny. You don’t need all that space.”
The voice echoed in her mind again, clear and unmistakable.
A small, quiet change occurred in the expression of Margaret’s face. The lines of fatigue around her eyes softened. The corners of her mouth, which had been set in an iron line of endurance, twitched upward by a millimeter. Then another. Until finally, a slow, radiant, and utterly ruthless smile spread across her kind, grandmotherly face.
She looked down the aisle.
The man was currently standing near the aft galley, fourth in a line of five passengers waiting for the two tiny lavatories. He was leaning against a bulkhead, his arms crossed over his navy merino sweater, looking thoroughly irritated by the delay. The red OCCUPIED sign on the first door remained lit. A flight attendant with a service cart was blocking the forward passage, meaning he was trapped in that queue for at least three minutes. Probably four.
Four minutes was an eternity for a woman who knew what she was doing.
Margaret did not hesitate. There was no hurried panic in her movements, no frantic glancing over her shoulder like a guilty child. She moved with the steady, calm efficiency of someone preparing a Sunday roast.
May you like
She bent down, reaching into her canvas tote bag beneath the seat in front of her. Her hand bypassed the mints, bypassed the reading glasses, and closed around several specific, ordinary items that had lived in the bottom of her travel kit for years.
She pulled them out, sat upright, and began her work.
