The Flight Attendant

Remember that person you wanted to be? There's still time.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. —Margaret Atwood

a smart girl is nobody’s pushover and nobody’s foe. A smart girl is both sword and smile.

It’s a terrible era when idiots are allowed to govern the blind,

She knew that most men desired her because she was attractive and she was smart, but also because she was a drunk and she was easy. This one? She hoped for his sake he wasn't as different as he seemed, because she always disappointed those men quickly or broke their hearts over time.

Do you know people cry on airplanes more than anywhere else?” “I didn’t know it was a fact,” she answered, “but I might have suspected as much from my years up here.” “Yeah, you’d probably know better than me. But on a plane, you’re often alone. Or you’re stressed. Or you’ve just had some meaningful experience. Movies and books will really get to you at thirty-five thousand feet.

Remember that person you wanted to be? There’s still time.

, sometimes you just have to bury the dead and move on.

Elena believed that reportage like that might be compelling and beautiful, but it would never gain traction in the Age of the Troll. In the Age of Mass Shootings. In the Age of the Suicide Bomb in the Crowd.

You want to know the definition of a consultant? A guy who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.

...The plain unvarnished reality that we cannot escape who we are and most of the time we die as we lived.

She knew the truth of men and women and booze: it rarely ended well for either gender, but it was the women who wound up raped.

Enrico was still alive. He had launched himself on top of Buckley, pinning him on his side on the mattress. There was a cut on Buckley’s cheek, the gash already puddling red, and he was holding his right hand with his left. The wound on his hand looked far worse than the one on his face: Cassie could see blood streaming down the man’s forearm, as well as the black burns along his fingers and thumb. His index finger was misshapen and either dislocated or broken.

It's inevitable we wind up together. It's simply because we all work together. I'm sure ad people marry ad people, and lawyers marry lawyers. All professions have office romances.

And so—certainly not proud of herself, but not precisely disgusted either—she showered, slipped into a pair of tight, come-hither jeans and a white blouse that was perfect for the last Saturday night in July, and went out into the dark.

Cassandra, Troy-born daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, knew the future, and no one believed her. At least most of the time that was what occurred. Apollo gave her the great gift of prophecy because he was confident that she was going to sleep with him; when, in the end, she refused, the god spat in her mouth, leaving behind the curse that no one would ever believe a word that she said. And so she lived with frustration and dread.

scopaesthesia. The idea was you could sense when you were being watched. It was a cousin of scopophobia: the fear of being watched.

She was a woman and she had spent enough time alone on subway platforms or streets late at night to know something was wrong.

Even the most successful people in this world make mistakes. Often they’re just better at correcting them and moving on.

Drones were such a guy thing, she thought. It was downright chromosomal.

Don’t judge me. I mean that. You have a great husband and two sweet kids—” “They’re sixteen and thirteen. They stopped being sweet years ago,

Finally she took a breath, cringing against the spikes behind her eyes, and turned 180 degrees in the bed to face Alex. And there he was. For a split second, her mind registered only the idea that something was wrong. It may have been the body’s utter stillness, but it may also have been the way she could sense the amphibian cold. But then she saw the blood. She saw the great crimson stain on the pillow, and a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. He was flat on his back. She saw his neck, the yawning red trench from one side of his jaw to the other, and how the blood had geysered onto his chest and up against the bottom of his chin, smothering the black stubble like honey. Reflexively, despite the pain, she threw off the sheet and leapt from the bed, retreating into those drapes against the window.

She closed her eyes against the shame, the disgust. She tried to remind herself that this was just who she was—how she was—and to ratchet down at least a little bit the self-loathing. Hadn’t they had fun last night? Of course they had. At least she presumed they had.

Good Lord, half of America was pretty sure their own president was a Russian puppet.

Cassie saw another member of the flight crew approaching, a fellow a bit older than her named Justin who had pulled on a pair of blue jeans and a white oxford shirt. At least she presumed he had gotten dressed again. She wondered if he often slept naked when he traveled, like some of her friends who flew, because it meant not packing pajamas. Or maybe his body ran hot (like hers), and he liked the feel of cool sheets against his skin when he fell asleep. Maybe he liked the erotic charge. Certainly some nights she did.

You can repair anything but dead. You can't fix that