The man’s name was Marcus Hale, though nothing about his appearance suggested the sort of life that name had once carried.
His jacket had faded to a dull gray that might once have been black, the collar worn thin where fabric had rubbed against the back of his neck for too many years, and the sleeves faintly stained with old engine grease that no detergent could quite erase. His shoes were the kind you bought when rent had to come first. Beside him sat his seven-year-old son, Liam, small enough that the oversized business-class seat seemed to swallow him whole.
And that seat—12F—was the kind of seat Marcus never expected to see up close.
He had done the math while buckling Liam’s seatbelt.
Three thousand dollars.
That was the rough price for this seat on a flight from Phoenix to Virginia.
Three thousand dollars was almost four months of Marcus’s rent.
The only reason they were sitting there at all was because of a quiet note the gate agent had read in the system before boarding.
