I boarded my husband's private jet and his secretary was in my seat, feeding him peeled orange. His mother told me to be considerate. I stepped off. Then the crew asked whether I wanted the flight cancelled.

Cancelling that flight makes me a woman who grounded a jet over a chair.

Eleven senior people, stranded on a tarmac, missing a board meeting — and every single one of them tells that story for fifteen years, and in every version of it I am unstable.

A very short shelf life and a very long memory. That is what a scene buys you and it is why I have never once had one.

What I did instead was charter a different aircraft.

Eleven thousand dollars, out of my own account, from a company with no connection to my family, booked from a terminal seat on a phone in about nine minutes.

It is the least dramatic eleven thousand dollars I have ever spent and it is the only money in this entire story that did any work.

I landed eleven hours before they did.

I slept four of them in a hotel near the airport, badly, with the phone face down.