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It’s been forty-five minutes since takeoff and the atmosphere on board is quiet, stoic, only a touch aggrieved. The delay, when time slowed and stretched and thinned so that every minute lasted its full quota of sixty seconds, is in the past. Time is once again ticking by at its usual brisk invisible pace.

A “light snack” of almonds, pretzels, crackers, and salsa has been served in the main cabin. The five business-class passengers have enjoyed a “light meal” (they all chose the chicken) and quite a lot of wine (they all chose the pinot).

In the main cabin, most of the garbage has been cleared and most tray tables are back up. The baby and the toddler are asleep. So is the bride, while the groom taps at his phone. The unaccompanied minor energetically plays a game on his device. The frail elderly couple bend their heads over separate crosswords. The crew chats in low voices about weekend plans and next week’s roster.

People make use of the lavatories. They put shoes back on. They eat breath mints. They apply lip balm. They see the next steps of their journeys rolling out ahead of them: collect bag from baggageclaim, line up for a taxi, order an Uber, text the person pickingthemup. They see themselves walking in the front door of their homes or hotels or Airbnbs, dropping bags with weary thuds. “What a nightmare,” they will say to their partners or pets or the walls, and then they will step right back into their lives.

—

The lady unbuckles her seat belt and stands.

She is a lady about to get something down from the overhead bin. Or a lady about to head to the toilet. She is of no consequence, no concern, no interest, no danger.

She bows her head and presses a fingertip to the tiny brooch pinned to her blouse.

She steps into the aisle and doesn’t move.

One person notices.

—

That person is a forty-two-year-old civil engineer with heartburn and a headache.

Leopold Vodnik, just Leo, never Leopold, to everyone except his maternal grandmother who is dead and an old university friend long gone from his life, is seated in 4C, directly across the aisle from the lady.

Theirs is the first row in the main cabin. They face a wall with a sign that declares Business Class Only past This Point . A curtain is discreetly drawn across the aisle to conceal the luxury lifestyle on offer just a short distance away.

Leo looks like he belongs in business class. He is an olive-skinned man of medium build, with a large, definite nose and a high forehead that ends abruptly in a shock of mad-professor gray-speckled dark curly hair. One of his sisters recently sent him an article about scientists discovering the gene for “uncombable hair syndrome.”

He wears a blue linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, gray chinos, and suede boots. His wife says he dresses better than her. (Not hard. Neve mostly dresses in the heedless, mismatched manner of someone who recently survived a natural disaster.)

Leo has spent the entire flight chewing antacids, massaging his forehead with his fingertips, and checking and rechecking the time.

It’s all over. He must face facts. His eleven-year-old daughter’s school musical is due to begin in five minutes. He will not be there because he is here: thirty-five thousand feet in the sky.

“Obviously I’ll be home in plenty of time for The Lion King, ” he’d told his wife when he’d first raised the possibility of flying down to Hobart to take his mother to a specialist’s appointment.

“Unless your flight back is delayed,” Neve had said.

“It won’t be,” said Leo.

“Knock on wood,” said Neve, without knocking on wood.

It kind of feels like the delay is her fault. Why even mention the possibility? He is meant to be the pessimistic one in their relationship.

Who could have predicted a two-hour delay?

Neve, apparently.

Leo checks the time once more. Right now, he should be shivering in his daughter’s school hall, hissing at his teenage son to put away hisphone and support his sister, exchanging good-humored banter about the arctic air-conditioning with the other parents, whispering to his wife to please remind him of Samira’s dad’s name, telling Samira’s dad they must have that beer soon, which they both know will never happen because…life.

His head pounds with remorse. The lights are going down right now. The curtains are opening right now. He leans so far forward in his seat he is virtually in the brace position.

There is no one to blame but himself. Nobody asked him to do this. His mother said, Please, Leo, don’t waste good money on a flight for just one day. His three sisters had not been grateful to him for taking on this familial duty. The opposite. They’d accused him of martyrdom on the family WhatsApp group.

But he’d had a strange strong feeling that something was not right with his mother’s health and that he should be there to hear what the specialist said.

When his dad first got sick two years ago, he’d been distracted.He’d just started at his current position and work had been all-consuming. It’s still all-consuming. He doesn’t know how to stop it from consuming him.

And then: the strident ring of his phone ripping him from sleep at five a.m. and his mother’s voice, so loud, assured, and awake. “You and your sisters need to get on a flight right now.” She the grown-up, he the mumbling, half-asleep kid. “What, Mum, what, why?” He hadn’t even properly processed the fact that his dad was seriously ill, let alone the possibility he might die, which he did, that day, while Leo and his sisters waited at the carousel for his middle sister’s bag: she’d checked a bag.

Ever since, he’s felt as though if he’d just concentrated more, if he hadn’t been so focused on his work, he might have saved his dad. He is the oldest child. The only son. He is determined to get everything right with his mother.

So much for strange strong feelings. The specialist took five minutes and charged three hundred dollars to announce that Leo’s mother was in perfect health.

Leo isn’t disappointed by his mother’s good health.

Of course not.

Look, truthfully, he is kind of annoyed by his mother’s good health. It would have been gratifying if she’d been diagnosed with something serious but curable.

Also, painless. He loves his mother very much.

“Oh, well,” Neve said when he called about the delay. At that point he’d still thought he’d make it, just a little late. He’d seen himself sprinting from the gate, line-jumping at the taxi stand—he would have broken his own moral code for his daughter! But then the plane continued to sit sullenly on the tarmac while the pilot made his infuriating intermittent “apologies, folks” messages and Leo lost his damned mind.

“There’s nothing you can do.” Neve didn’t say I told you so. She never did. That was her power move. “Bridie will understand.” He could hear Bridie in the background: “That better not be Daddy saying he’s running late.”

He has been helping Bridie rehearse for weeks. “It’s a small but significant role, Daddy,” she’d told him solemnly when she first came home with the script, and Leo had avoided Neve’s eyes because Bridie is sensitive to shared parental smiles. She is playing “Zazu” (now, right now). Zazu is “a prim, proper hornbill bird,” and the way Bridie instantly embodied the role was miraculous. She has gestures! Prim, proper gestures! She is Meryl Freaking Streep. She is that objectively good. Forget Mufasa. Forget Simba. Zazu will be the shining star of tonight’s performance. Leo fully expects Bridie to receive a standing ovation. And he is missing it.

This is the sort of mistake people regret on their deathbeds.

He exhales noisily, sits back in his seat, and clicks the buckle of his seat belt open and shut, open and shut. The woman next to him lifts her head from her magazine and Leo locks his hands together. He’s being annoying. It’s the kind of thing his fourteen-year-old son would do.

His heart jerks at the thought of his son. For months now, he’s been promising Oli they will do that beautiful national park walk they love, next Sunday, but it’s always “next Sunday” because Leo so often needs to work on weekends, and this Sunday he’ll need to catch up on everything he missed doing today, which does not, by the way, make him a “workaholic,” just a guy with a job.

His boss believes it’s important to achieve a healthy work-life balance. “Family always comes first, Leo,” she said, when Leo mentioned he’d be taking today off, but one of Leo’s key performance indicators is his “utilization rate.” This is a measure of how many billable hours he logs each week compared to how many hours he has worked. His utilization rate is always in his thoughts: it’s a buzzing mosquito he’s not allowed to kill. Sometimes he works a fourteen-hour day but only bills eight. It’s tricky. Life is tricky. He just needs to get a handle on time management. His boss, who has an interest in the topic, gives him book and podcast recommendations as well as useful tips. He’s been working for Lilith for three years now. She’s an impressive, inspirational woman in a male-dominated profession and he’s trying to learn from her the way he learned from his very first boss, who would return Leo’s drawings covered in red ink, which drove Leo crazy but ultimately made him a better engineer. Lilith recently told him the first step to improving productivity is a “comprehensive time audit,” but Leo hasn’t had time to do one.

Oli doesn’t even look disappointed anymore each time Leo says, “Maybe we’ll do the walk next weekend.” He just responds with a cynical thumbs-up like he’s dealing with a retailer’s recurring broken delivery promises.

The woman in the middle seat clears her throat delicately and he realizes his left leg is jiggling up and down as if he’s been electrocuted. He puts his hand on his thigh to still it.

He hears his wife’s voice: Do not spiral, honey.

He couldn’t believe it the first time she called him honey. The sweet feeling of that moment.

He smiles tightly in the vague direction of his seatmate, which he hopes she will take as an unspoken apology but not an invitation tochat.

Her name is Sue and her husband, in the window seat, is Max.

Leo knows this, and a lot more about them, because during the delay on the tarmac he had no choice but to overhear as the pair made an astonishing number of phone calls: “Wait, Sue wants a word!” “Let me give you back to Max!”

Max and Sue are a jolly, exuberant middle-aged couple just back from a trip driving a camper van around Tasmania. It was a blast! Sue is tiny, rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, and big-bosomed. A silver bracelet loaded with charms jingles as she gesticulates. Max is tanned and white-haired, with a big firm proud tummy. Like Santa Claus back from his summer break. He has the same confident masculinity as the foremen Leo works with: strong, loud men who know what they’re doing and have no difficulty managing their time.

At first, Sue tried to chat with Leo but gave up when he answered in barely polite monosyllables. He knows he could have told her about missing Bridie’s concert, and he knows she and Max are the type to have offered instant sympathy and interest (he gathers from all the calls that they have grandchildren—“Grandpa and I can’t wait to see you!”), but he’d been too tightly wound up to chat.

He looks again at the time. Bridie is onstage right now.

Stop thinking about it.

His stomach growls. He is starving. He refused the “light snack,” because—and this is so stupid—he didn’t want to slow things down. He’d been irrationally annoyed by all those people happily snacking on their nuts and pretzels. He wanted everyone to focus on getting to Sydney.

The lady across the aisle from him unbuckles her seat belt.

She stands.

Until now, she has been a blurred figure in his peripheral vision. If asked, he could have described her as a small lady with silver hair, but there is no way he could have picked her out of a lineup of small silver-haired ladies.

She moves into the aisle, right next to him, facing the back of the plane.

She doesn’t move.

What’s she doing?

Leo keeps his eyes politely on the seat pocket on the wall in front of him. He reads the top line of an advertisement on the back cover of the in-flight magazine: What are you waiting for? Book your Jewels of Europe River Cruise today! “We’ll know we’re old when those river cruises start to look attractive,” Neve always says. Leo has not confessed that the idea of a river cruise already seems attractive to him.

The silver-haired lady is still not moving. It’s been too long. She’s kind of crowding him. Kind of bugging him.

He glances down. Her shoes are small, brown, well-polished, and neatly laced.

She says in a quiet, clear voice, “On the count of three.”