“That’s better.”
A year after Flight 417, passengers gathered aboard another transatlantic flight from New York to Madrid.
Seat 8A was occupied by a little boy with dinosaur headphones.
Beside him sat Ethan.
Maya took the aisle seat.
As the aircraft climbed, Leo looked nervously toward the cockpit.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“What if something goes wrong?”
Maya smiled.
Ethan leaned toward him.
“Then we panic dramatically.”
Maya elbowed him.
Leo laughed.
“Seriously.”
Maya looked out the window.
Clouds stretched beneath them in endless white.
Once, the sky had represented everything she had lost.
Ethan.
Her career.
The person she had been.
Now she understood something she had never learned inside a fighter cockpit.
Not every return required going backward.
Sometimes returning meant discovering the place you had been trying to reach all along.
She looked at Ethan.
He was helping Leo draw a Triceratops.
Badly.
Very badly.
“That looks like a potato,” Leo complained.
