He had walked away from a lucrative engineering career at that time, trading a corner office and a six-figure salary for a small rented hangar and a schedule flexible enough to make every school recital and every parent conference. Avery never remembered a version of her father who chased titles or bonuses. Only a version who came home every night smelling faintly of jet fuel and always asked about her day before mentioning anything about his own. That steadiness forged in the hardest years of his life was the same quality that now made him immovable in the face of Vivien Blackthorne's pressure. Vivien, meanwhile, treated the project less like a repair and more like a personal renovation, sending a steady stream of new requests through Dorian's office.
She wanted the interior fabric changed twice, a private conference cabin added where a galley used to be, the satellite communication system upgraded, and the delivery date moved up by nearly 3 weeks to accommodate a business trip she considered non-negotiable. Rowan absorbed each change calmly, insisting only that Dorian confirm every addition through email so there would be a paper trail matching the work being done. Though Dorian consistently avoided signing any formal amendment to the original contract. Mara Ellison, the chief pilot for Blackthorne's fleet, began visiting the hangar regularly to check on the aircraft's progress. Initially skeptical that a small independent shop could handle a repair this complex without cutting corners somewhere along the way.
She had flown for Blackthorne for nearly a decade. Long enough to see several rounds of budget cuts trickle down into shortcuts on maintenance schedules that always made her uneasy. And long enough to develop a strong instinct for spotting a facility that talked a good game without the substance to back it up. Her first two visits left her unconvinced, mostly because Rowan answered her technical questions with such plain, unhurried honesty that she assumed at first he was simply being evasive about problems he did not want to admit. What she found instead was a team that treated every rivet and every weld like it mattered.
Led by a man who seemed to understand the Gulfstream structure more intimately than the manufacturer representatives, Blackthorne had flown in earlier that year. During one inspection, Rowan discovered a hairline crack buried deep beneath an older repair layer. The kind of flaw that would have gone completely undetected if the crew had simply followed the original insurance report and called it a day. Rather than patch over it and move on, he quietly authorized his team to open up a much larger section of the airframe, absorbing the additional labor cost himself rather than sending Blackthorne a change order for something he considered a basic matter of safety. Dorian was furious when he learned about the expanded scope of work, accusing Rowan of manufacturing extra tasks simply to inflate the final bill and squeeze more money out of the company.
Rowan responded not with anger, but with evidence laying out ultrasonic scan results, timestamped photographs, and a written structural analysis explaining exactly why the crack could not be safely ignored. Dorian could not dispute the data, but he pressed Rowan anyway to be, in his words, more flexible about the invoice, reminding him that Blackthorne's continued business could shape the future of his small shop for years to come. Rowan told him in the same even tone he used for nearly everything that the aircraft did not care how wealthy its owner happened to be, because Metal only understood whether it was safe or whether it was not. It was around this time that Mara noticed Rowan's signature on an older set of structural repair drawings pinned to the wall of his office. Drawings that predated Hale Arrow restoration entirely and traced back to a major aircraft manufacturer's engineering division.
She began to suspect that Vivien Blackthorne had not simply hired a mechanic with a small shop, but had unknowingly hired one of the very engineers who helped design the repair standards the entire industry now relied on. After 6 months of relentless work, the Gulfstream rolled out of the hangar, looking nearly indistinguishable from the day it first left the factory floor. Its fuselage polished, its cabin rebuilt, every ground test passed without a single flag. Vivien treated the handover like an internal press event, inviting board members, business partners, and the full flight crew to witness the aircraft's return in person. When Rowan handed the final invoice to Dorian, it included the remaining contract balance, the additional cabin work Vivien had personally requested, the material upgrades, and the structural repair costs tied directly to emails Dorian himself had approved months earlier.
Dorian announced in front of the assembled crowd that Blackthorne would not be paying the invoice at all, citing a 3-day delay in the delivery schedule as grounds for withholding payment entirely. Rowan calmly pointed out that the delay traced directly back to Vivien's own requested changes to the interior and communication systems. Changes documented in writing exactly as he had insisted from the very first week of the project. Vivien did not so much as glance at the paperwork Rowan offered. She took the invoice from Dorian's hands, mocked Rowan for believing that a handful of emails could ever obligate a company worth billions of dollars, and tore the pages in half in front of her entire executive team.
She reminded him loudly enough for everyone in the hangar to hear that he was nothing more than a mechanic running a rented shop with a skeleton crew and that if he tried to sue Blackthorne's legal department could drag the case out for years until his small business simply collapsed under the weight of it. She went further still mentioning that she understood he had a daughter's tuition to worry about. A detail that made it clear Dorian had done some quiet digging into Rowan's personal life. Rowan asked her only one question in return, calm and direct, was she formally refusing to complete the handover process as outlined in their contract. When she answered that the aircraft belonged to her, and needed no one's permission to fly, Rowan reached into his jacket, placed his technical certification card on the table between them, and quietly began gathering his personal files.
He did not argue further, did not threaten legal action in the moment, and did not ask anyone to physically stop the aircraft from leaving the hangar. As he walked out into the afternoon light, Vivien ordered Mara to prepare the Gulf Stream for immediate departure, eager to prove that no single contractor, however skilled, could inconvenience her for long, Mara opened the aircraft's completion binder out of habit, flipping toward the final page, where the return to service authorization was meant to be signed, the box remained empty, and she stood there for a long moment before quietly closing the binder again. Vivien climbed aboard with Dorian and a handful of assistants, luggage already loaded, ground crew already clearing the tarmac. A flight plan already filed for a morning departure the next day. The cockpit, however, stayed dark and silent.
Mara stepped back down the air stairs and told Vivien plainly that she could not fly the aircraft without a signed return to service authorization, confirming the completion of every safety requirement. Vivien dismissed the concern as pointless bureaucracy and ordered her co-pilot to take the controls instead. The co-pilot reviewed the same binder, reached the same empty box, and gave Vivien the same answer Mara had. Two additional pilots from the Blackthorne roster were summoned, and each one, after a brief look at the paperwork, declined for identical reasons, unwilling to accept personal responsibility for an aircraft that had not been formally cleared for operation. Dorian, growing desperate, phoned a contract pilot service, and offered a fee five times the standard rate to anyone willing to fly the jet.
That same evening, two pilots arrived within the hour, reviewed the maintenance log, and walked back to their car without a word of negotiation. One of them paused just long enough to explain that if anything went wrong mid-flight, it would be his license, his career, and potentially far worse resting on his shoulders, not the companies. Vivien, increasingly convinced that Rowan had somehow orchestrated a coordinated mutiny among her flight crew, accused him of turning her own employees against her out of spite. Mara corrected her firmly, insisting that Rowan had never once contacted her and that every pilot's decision had been made independently based solely on an unsigned document sitting in an otherwise completed binder. The situation escalated further when the insurance carrier sent formal notice that the aircraft did not qualify for operational coverage without a completed return to service authorization and that any unauthorized flight would void protection entirely, potentially removing every pilot involved from coverage under the fleet's broader policy.