She had been.
That’s what the audit found.
Fourteen times in eleven months.
Fourteen paying passengers, over eleven months, quietly moved out of seats they’d chosen, by a woman with nineteen years of access and a theory that nobody ever checks.
Eleven of the fourteen had been travelers with children.
That’s the part that took my breath.
She’d been picking them.
Not randomly — Delphine’s report noted the pattern and used a phrase I’ve never forgotten: “the displaced parties were, in the majority, passengers who could be expected to yield rather than escalate.”
Passengers who could be expected to yield.
Parents with babies.
People who don’t make a scene because they’re holding a sleeping child and their older kid is watching to see if the world is a safe place.
She’d done it fourteen times.
And the fifteenth time, she picked a woman whose ten-year-old reads instruction manuals for fun.
