Chapter 9 - The Woman Everyone Hated
Catherine Ward watched the viral clip alone in her apartment. Her phone buzzed until she turned it face down. Twenty years of service had been reduced to fourteen ugly seconds, and she knew those seconds were real.
She had thrown a child's bag. She had raised her voice. She had ignored his boarding pass. There was no defense for those choices.
Still, the clip left out what had happened at the gate.
Before the passengers boarded, Harold had called her into the jet bridge. “We have an identity discrepancy with 2A,” he'd said. “Don't explain it publicly. Reassign the minor discreetly.”
She had asked to see the paperwork.
“Operations verified it,” Harold told her. “And the investor's son is coming. Don't make this difficult.”
Catherine had believed the authority and resented the demand. By the time she saw Malik, frustration had turned her voice sharp. When he refused to move, she made a bad situation worse.
A knock sounded at her door.
It was Selena Brooks, holding no camera and making no promises.
“I'm here because I want the truth,” Selena said.
“You're here to fire me.”
“Your conduct is under review. I can't change that. I need to know what Harold told you.”
Catherine let her in and produced a crumpled slip of paper from her kitchen drawer.
SEAT 2A — MOVE TO 18F. DO NOT DISCUSS STATUS FLAG IN CABIN.
“Why didn't you show this immediately?” Selena asked.
“I was ashamed of what I'd done. Then Harold called me and said there was no paper.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“He said if I created a problem, he'd make sure nobody hired me again.”
Selena photographed the note and asked Catherine to preserve the original.
On the bottom, almost hidden beneath a crease, was a handwritten phone number. Selena recognized it from a confidential board contact sheet.
May you like
It wasn't Harold's.
It belonged to the chair of Mesa Airlines' finance committee.
