that she still owed him a wish. Nolan did not look up from his work as he answered that he knew. He added that wishes spoken in moments of desperation were rarely ones a person should be asked to collect immediately. Evelyn asked whether the words about his daughter needing a mother had been something he genuinely wanted.
And Nolan was quiet for a long moment before answering that no child should ever be handed a stranger as a prize. He said only that he wished for someone good enough that Avery would stop believing family was something that simply ended once tragedy arrived. And Evelyn found she had no response ready for a sentence like that. With the technical crisis behind them, a new problem emerged. Since the lead pilot remained hesitant to fly while an internal investigation into the sabotage was still ongoing, Evelyn needed someone certified to operate the aircraft once its systems had been restored.
It was Nolan who quietly revealed he still held a valid commercial pilot license along with test flight certification from years earlier, credentials he rarely mentioned after leaving the world of corporate aviation behind. Evelyn was startled once again by how much capability had been hiding beneath the surface of a man she had spent the night underestimating. Nolan agreed to fly only under the condition that a properly certified co-pilot joined him and that every safety procedure was documented in full, refusing to cut corners even under pressure, which made the moment feel earned rather than reckless. During the flight to Seattle, Evelyn sat toward the rear of the cabin, unable to sleep despite the exhaustion pressing down on her shoulders. Through the open cockpit door, she watched Nolan work with calm, practiced precision, a striking contrast to the quiet, guarded mechanic she had first met only hours before.
In a brief exchange once the aircraft leveled out, Evelyn admitted she had never really known what a family was supposed to feel like since her father built an empire but turned every dinner into another business meeting and her mother had left when. Evelyn was still a child. She had grown up believing that survival meant needing absolutely no one, a lesson reinforced at every turn by the world she had been raised in. Nolan told her he had believed something similar after losing his wife, convinced for a while that isolation was simply the price of surviving loss. He described, quietly and without asking for sympathy, the months after Grace died when he had stopped answering calls from old friends, certain that grief was something meant to be carried alone rather than shared.