She was hard to miss. On Saturday afternoon, there was Hope Hicks, President Donald Trump’s striking former communications director and surrogate daughter, wearing a white shift dress and nude pumps at Morristown Municipal Airport, preparing to accompany the president to a campaign rally in Ohio. Her appearance was pure serendipity, according to people familiar with her thinking. She had planned to spend the weekend at Trump’s golf club in New Jersey to catch up with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner; when the president learned that she would be in town, these people said, he asked her to come along to the rally. For old times’ sake.

Hicks accepted, and, once on board, even engaged in some of her former pastimes. On the flight back to New Jersey from the rally, she walked back to the press section of Air Force One and chatted off the record with reporters. According to people familiar with the conversation, she talked about getting back to life outside of the White House bubble, and catching up on TV she missed; she said she was looking forward to hearing about the president’s meeting with Queen Elizabeth last month. She jokingly crowd-sourced suggestions for what her next career move should be. Photographers snapped her deplaning Air Force One on the front staircase, the same side used by the president, rather than the one in the back, where staffers and the press typically exit.

Ever since she left the administration in March, Hicks has become a twisted sort of celebrity, certainly the most famous among former Trump staffers. Part of this may have to do with the fact that the onetime Ralph Lauren model, who seems hijacked from the pages of the Miss Porter’s alumnae magazine, was always such an enigma in the first place. In a White House prone to outrage and hysterics, she rarely spoke on the record, barely ever appeared on-camera, and conducted herself in a mannered, white-glove way. Hicks’s professionalism made some decisions—such as her relationship with Rob Porter, a fellow former White House staffer with an alleged history of spousal abuse, or her role in Trump’s now potentially perilous response to the news that his son Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower in pursuit of dirt on Hillary Clinton—difficult to square. (Porter has denied allegations of abuse.) Hicks, in many ways, became something of a Rorschach test. Was she a punctilious, precocious aide who had been forced to tell “white lies,” as she put it to the House Intelligence Committee, in order to merely do her job? Was she a canny operator who harbored her own ambitions? Or was she a victim of perverse Stockholm syndrome? Regardless of the theory one might ascribe to, many found Hicks’s resignation a small act of emancipation.

Her next steps, meanwhile, have garnered outsize attention. After she left the White House, she spent time with her family in Connecticut before moving to the Upper East Side to focus on the job hunt in earnest. Last week, the New York Post reported that she had been spotted having lunch with Aryeh Bourkoff, the renowned investment banker who Kushner consulted during the campaign about a possible Trump TV network. Hicks has taken meetings with other banks and executives, according to people familiar with her thinking, and sought advice from her former White House colleague Dina Powell. “She’s just trying to live her life, and if everyone’s going to be following her every move anyway, why not do what she wants to do?” one of these people told me over the weekend. “The expectation that she would totally cut herself off from the family cold turkey is unrealistic.” In fact, she did not totally cut herself off once she left. According to two people familiar with the situation, she helped arrange Trump’s sit-down with Piers Morgan last month when he visited London. But her role then was kept quiet, unlike her very public visit over the weekend. The person familiar with her thinking added: “If she’s going to be scrutinized anyway, she may as well enjoy herself. No job is going to be as good as what she came off of, so you have to find a way to slow down and come back to reality. There’s opportunities for her in finance-related jobs. The biggest issue is finding a place where she feels comfortable. There aren’t that many places where she feels safe and secure.”

One of those places, at least over the weekend, appeared to be Air Force One, sparking chatter that she might be returning to the Trump fold. As my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported recently, Hicks was discussed by some as a dark horse to one day replace John Kelly as chief of staff. Indeed, speaking to the press on Saturday, Hicks said that she would perhaps consider it if the time was right. At the same time, her brief foray back into the maelstrom may have reminded her of some potential hazards. While Hicks was aware that her presence on the plane would cause a stir, the people familiar with her thinking told me, she did not anticipate subsequent theories on social media and cable news about whether her private conversations with the president on Saturday could be considered witness tampering. Some widely speculated that amidst a week in which Trump was openly talking about the Trump Tower meeting, and privately fretting about his son’s legal exposure, having Hicks on board was, at best, inappropriate, and, at worse, a chance for them to get their stories straight. There are, of course, plenty of people who still work in the White House and associate with the president, these people noted, including Stephen Miller, Corey Lewandowski, and White House counsel Don McGahn, who were also witnesses to these and other events of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller, and who frequently travel with the president and hold private conversations with him without any similar accusations.

As the Hicks job search continues, one suggestion that keeps coming up, according to these people, is that she set up shop with fellow former White House flack Josh Raffel. The two had worked together years ago at Hiltzik Strategies before joining forces again on Pennsylvania Avenue. Many assumed that this would be their plan, these people continued, since the two are close friends and both resigned from their West Wing roles around the same time. Neither of them is opposed to the idea, according to these people, but it is not something that that they’ve mapped out in a real way.