voice unsettled her more than any panic would have. Grant Blackwood called twice in the span of 10 minutes, urging Evelyn to switch to a video conference instead of flying, but she knew the investors expected her in the room, not on a screen, and the pressure in her chest tightened with every passing second. Desperate and out of options, Evelyn turned to Nolan and said the words she would later regret, telling him to fix her plane and she would grant him one wish, whatever he wanted, no matter the cost.
Nolan did not lift his head from the panel he was inspecting when he answered that his daughter needed a mother, and for a moment, the entire hangar seemed to hold its breath. Evelyn stared at him, certain she had misheard, certain that a man in a stained jacket had just made a joke at her expense in front of her own staff. Evelyn's expression hardened instantly, and she assumed the man was mocking her, testing the limits of what a desperate woman with a corporate jet would tolerate at 2:00 in the morning. She warned him coldly that she had no patience for cheap jokes, that every minute he wasted was a minute closer to losing everything she had spent years building. Nolan did not raise his voice or try to explain himself with any urgency, only saying that she had asked what he wanted.
And he had answered with the first honest thing that came to mind. He added, almost to himself, that it had not been a proposal or a flirtation, more like a breath escaping after being held too long by a man who had been both mother and father to his child for longer than he cared to count. One of the ground crew members let out a short, nervous laugh, while Evelyn's assistant looked away, unsure whether to intervene or pretend nothing had happened. Evelyn felt the sting of humiliation, but could not afford to send him away because without him, there was no one else who could touch the aircraft before dawn. What none of them knew, and what Nolan had no intention of explaining to strangers in a hangar at 2:00 in the morning, was that the words had come from somewhere far older than the crisis in front of them.
His wife, Grace, had passed away almost three years earlier, a slow illness that had drained the color out of their house long before it finally took her. And in the time since, Nolan had rebuilt his entire life around a single goal,