For much of the lurching taxi journey there, M put the sky under scrutiny. Look, it’s much too clear. Much too blue.

It was only intensified as we neared the airport. Who exactly do they think they’re fooling? The bastards.

Our 8:40am flight to Dublin had been abruptly cancelled owing to fog. But a notion as vague as air could never satisfy M; she had convinced herself a cynical truth lay hidden behind that now vanished white drift.

It will have been undersold, she said, as we pushed into the cool, cavernous terminal.

The woman at the check-in desk corroborated the fog, but the scalpel glint in M’s eye didn’t lift. She made her position unambiguous: there had been no phone call, no apology, nothing. She’d spent the entire morning re-arranging meetings. And now they were all the way back in row 23?

Blanched, the woman apologised and said she would take a look.  

They were emergency exit seats, M clarified, and swept her tenacious body aside to illustrate my craning height. I stood frozen like a prop. I focused on the blanched woman’s submissive smile. Searching for a twitch, a grimace, rage, anything under there. But she absorbed it all, like soft, repetitive blows.

It just vanished from the app overnight. If I ran our business like this we’d be starving.

After twenty-eight years, I still wasn’t sure how much of M’s outrage was real and how much of it was strategy.

We were moved ...