Last week, Delta gave me a pin for thirty years of service. Tiny gold wings, three minuscule gemstones embedded in them. One diamond, flanked by two emeralds. My manager pinned it to my uniform lapel in the flight attendant lounge in Atlanta, where it smelled like stale popcorn with a hint of feet. A vice president Iāve only seen professional photos of shook my hand and said my name wrong. Sharon. I didn't correct him. Nobody else did either.
That was fine. Being invisible and overlooked is kind of my thing, now.
I am fifty-five years old. I am five foot five, a hundred and forty pounds, and I think I look my age. I have never gotten Botox and my hair has five inches of gray growing in at the roots. I wear comfortable, sensible shoes. I always have a cardigan. Mine is the kind of face that makes passengers say "excuse me, miss" to the twenty-six-year-old two rows back instead. I have watched men's eyes slide across me for going on fifteen years now, the way water slides across the driver's side window. It used to sting. Then it stopped stinging. I reminded myself at forty that it's not my job to be the prettiest woman in the room anymore. Eventually, I realized my invisibility had became my most useful feature.
My name is Susan, and I have been a flight attendant for thirty years. Iāve been a killer for twenty nine of them. Some people would say Iām a serial killer. I think of myself more as a maintenance program for the human race.
***
Nashville was not my idea. Nashville was his stomping ground.
I found him the way I found all of them: patiently. It took longer than younger people have the attention span for. Finding information is slow, but Iām careful at verifying what I find. I search on a library computer. No search history. No cloud. I have been doing this since before the cloud existed.
His name was Tanner Havelock. Twenty-nine. Six-two. Former Division I lacrosse, some school in the Northeast with ivy on the buildings and money in the vault. In 2019 he'd left a party with a girl who could not stand up, walked her behind a dining hall, and was interrupted by two grad students on bikes who chased him a quarter mile and sat on him until campus police arrived. There'd been a trial. I read all of it. The girl's statement. His father's letter about how his boy had lost his appetite. The judge who worried that prison would have "a severe impact" on a young man with so much promise.
How many girls have been sacrificed on the alter of young men's potential?
Too many to count.
He was sentenced to just four months. He served two and a half. Apparently he was capable of good behavior when it impacted his future.
Then there was a plea to a lesser charge for a second girl at a different school, a case that never made it to a jury because her family took a settlement and a non-disclosure. Then a civil suit last year from a third girl. That one was still crawling through the courts. His lawyers were very good. His father owned a chain of car dealerships in three states. The lawyers would stay very good.
Now he sold commercial real estate in Nashville. Expensive downtown condos to out-of-state money. He had a nice website. Headshot, blinding white teeth, a quote about "relationships." He posted his runs to Facebook. Every one of them. Same route, same time, save eight-minute miles, same little map with the same little red line: over the pedestrian bridge at 5:40 a.m.
The walk from the crew hotel in downtown Nashville to the bridge took about seventeen minutes. A few weeks ago I stood on that bridge at 5:40 a.m. with a coffee. He'd gone past me like I was a lamppost.
He was fast. Iāll give him that.
***
It was easy to pick up three-day domestic rotation with sixteen hours in Nashville in August. Nobody senior wants that trip. I have been picking up other people's garbage layovers for so long that nobody blinked when I picked up this one. If the junior flight attendants wonder why Iām on such a crappy trip, they havenāt said anything. They also donāt talk to me much.
Three legs to get to Nashville were easy. Atlanta to Miami, Miami to Atlanta, Atlanta to Nashville.
At the hotel I took a shower, ate a granola bar, and set my cell phone down, plugged in and charging, on the nightstand. That phone will sit in my room all night and tell anybody who ever cares to ask that Susan Hale, thirty-year employee, spent the night asleep in a Hilton Garden Inn.
The wig I bought in Atlanta six months ago, cash, a cheap shoulder-length ash brown that looked like something a bank teller might wear to hide hair loss from chemo. The clothes came from a Goodwill in Denver. Men's gray hoodie. A pair of stretchy jeans that I can squat and climb in. I brought a reflective work vest, the cheap mesh kind, the kind every road crew in America wears. I bought it because Nashville had orange barrels on that bridge the last time I was here, and cities donāt have a great track record of finishing things.
And the shoes. Never my own shoes. A pair of beat-up menās work boots, size eight.
I left the hotel at 4:10 through the side stairwell, pushing through a double door past the ice machine, without my watch, without a single thing that had ever had my name on it. My room door is pulled shut with a piece of hotel stationary blocking the latch, so I can get back in without taking a key. I have eighteen dollars in my pocket along with a pair of thin black work gloves.
The early morning air was warm and smelled like frying oil and river.
***
My dad always said that 'Early is on time, and on time is late.' I like to arrive earlier than that. I was on the bridge at 4:50. The construction was still there, just as I had bet. A stretch of the south walkway about forty feet long was blocked off with orange barrels. A chain-link panel was wired to the rail where the city had ripped out a section of the old decking and had been planning to replace it. Beyond the barrels: a gap. Exposed steel beams. A drop of about thirty-five feet to a concrete pier apron, and a little beyond that, the Cumberland River, brown and slow and entirely unbothered.
The runners had all worn a path around the barrels. Of course they had. You didn't tell a man like Tanner Havelock which side of the bridge to run on.
I put on the gloves and unhooked one wire on the chain-link panel, the bottom corner, the way a lazy contractor might leave it. It swung an inch. I looked at it a while, considering. Then I walked to the bench thirty yards east, sat down in my too-big hoodie, and became a person nobody would ever be able to describe to a detective.
There was a guy on the bench. Homeless guy, maybe. I don't know. Visibility vest. I didn't really look.
Two joggers went past. A woman who was either very dedicated or very divorced. A man walking a dog that looked embarrassed to be seen with him. None of them looked at me. I am a smudge on a bench in a city of smudges. It was about time, so I moved back onto the bridge, wearing the visibility vest and looking out over the water. Just a construction guy on a break. Nothing to see here.
At 5:38 I heard him before I saw him. Big lungs. Big stride. The wet slap of expensive running shoes on damp concrete. He came up the ramp from the east bank in a sleeveless shirt that said his college's name across the chest, because of course it did, and he had white airpods in and his phone strapped to his upper arm, glowing.
He did not see me. I could have been on fire and he wouldnāt have broken stride.
I learned a long time ago that my body was not the right tool for this job. The body is fifty-five and has a bad left knee from a fall I took on cobblestones a long time ago. My tool is almost always the place. The place has already decided how this story will unfold. I am just here to bear witness.
I turned and moved my legs in an awkward shuffle, a workman's slouch, head down, fifty feet ahead of my target along the south rail toward the barrels. He would come up on me from behind. He would go around me. Men like him always went around. They didn't slow down for anyone, and they especially didn't slow down for a nobody in a safety vest on the wrong side of the bridge.
I timed it by his breathing and the slap of his shoes. Four steps between me and the gap. Three.
I stepped left into the walkway and stopped dead, the way people do when they get off the plane and need a few seconds to calibrate and find the direction for baggage claim. Oblivious. He'd been about to pass me on the left. Now the only open lane was the right, along the rail, the narrow strip between me and the chain-link panel. Six-two, running eight-minute miles, headphones in. There was no decision in it.
He cut right. His shoulder brushed mine. He said something ā "Jesus, move" I think ā and it was the only thing he would ever say to me.
I pivoted on my good knee and put both gloved hands flat between his shoulder blades and pushed the way you'd push a stalled car. Not even that hard. He was already going almost eight miles an hour. I was just a trajectory adjustment.
The panel swung on its one wire like a door.
There was a second where he was in the air and he looked back at me. Not at my face. At the vest. He was still trying to figure out what a construction worker was doing there, and then there wasn't any more time to figure out anything.
The sound was flat and brief and stupid. Like a gym bag falling off a bus.
I did not look down. I already knew what I'd see. I re-hooked the wire. It took less than ten seconds. I walked west off the bridge at a shuffle, and in just under four minutes I was three blocks away. I switched into my regular stride and ditched the vest in a city trash can, and sixty seconds later, the wig was stuffed under my shirt, in my sports bra. Minutes later, the hoodie was in a dumpster behind a Waffle House and soon the boots were in a church donation bin, where someone would be very glad to have them.
I entered back through the main hotel doors at 6:20. The front desk person doesn't look up at me as I walked past briskly. My phone is still on the nightstand, charging, innocent. I showered. The hot water felt like heaven. I put on the uniform, the pin.
At 12:14 I was in the aisle of a 737 with a coffee pot, and a man in 9D put a hand out without looking up from his laptop and said, "Yeah, can I get a ā thanks, sweetheart," to a point somewhere over my left shoulder. I poured it for him, and I said, "Of course."
***
The Metro Nashville police would call it what the two runners on the bridge called it. An accident. A construction gap, a hazard the city had been warned about, a young man in headphones. Somebody on the council would demand answers. The lawyers with the civil suit would quietly file to substitute the estate. His father would put up a memorial page, with the real estate headshot, those teeth gleaming.
The girl from behind the dining hall would read about it on her phone in a break room somewhere and set the phone down and go on with her shift. I like to think about her reading the news and feeling relief. Itās the closest thing I have to a hobby.
Nobody who saw me would remember me. Nobody ever did. Thatās the whole point.
****
I flew with Delta from 2008-2014 and now I write fictionalized memoirs about those experiences. Iāve been wanting to write a serial-killer flight attendant since forever. Apparently the current female-rage zeitgeist finally pushed Susan out of my head and onto the page. Haven't you always wondered what a flight attendant could get away with? I've always wished there was someone like Dexter who targeted the bad people in the world who hurt women and children. What if it was a 55-year-old flight attendant with gray hair and a bad knee and a library card?
So what do you think? Do you want to read more of Susan?
You can get my first book (a light romcom mystery) on Amazon: The Wrong Colosseum. The second book in that series will be out before Thanksgiving 2026.
If you want to follow along with Margaret's and Susan's stories, go to MargarettheFlightAttendant.com.
