Chapter 12

"So, what are you going to do?" Elias asked."I'm going to ask you one more time to fly that NASA demonstration," she said. "Not for the company, not for the contract—for you. Because Lily asked you when you're going to fly again, and you told her someday. Let someday be now."Elias was quiet for a long moment. "You don't understand what you're asking. I don't trust myself up there anymore. What if I freeze? What if I make the wrong call again?""What if you don't?" Vivian moved closer. "What if you get up there and remember that you're one of the best pilots in the world? What if you show your daughter that falling down doesn't mean staying down?""And if I crash your prototype in front of NASA and every aerospace journalist in the country?""Then we'll build another one together."The word hung between them, heavy with implication: together. Not as CEO and employee, not as billionaire and janitor, but as two people who'd found each other in the wreckage of their grief and discovered that maybe, just maybe, they could rebuild something better.The decision came from an unexpected place. That night, after Vivian had left, Lily sat with her father on the hood of a maintenance cart, eating the dinner he'd packed, looking up at the aircraft suspended in the hangar."Daddy," she said thoughtfully, "do you still love the sky?"Elias looked at his daughter, this perfect small person who represented everything he'd managed to protect in a world that had taken so much. "What makes you ask that?""Because you look at the planes the way you look at pictures of Mommy," Lily said with the devastating honesty of children. "Like you love them, but they make you sad."He had no answer for that.So Lily continued, "Miss Vivian said you're the best pilot she knows. And you told me to always be brave and try new things, even when they're scary. But you're not being brave about flying. You're being scared."

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