making sure Avery never felt like something essential had been permanently removed from her world. He worked odd repair contracts at small airfields because the hours were flexible enough to get her to school in the morning and be home before dark. Sacrificing the kind of career he once had in exchange for a life that could bend around a child's needs. There were nights he sat at the kitchen table long after Avery had gone to sleep, staring at old photographs, wondering whether he was doing any of it right, wondering whether a father alone could ever be enough.
The line about needing a mother had not been calculated or clever. It had simply been the truth sitting closest to the surface of a tired man's mind when a stranger with more money than sense asked him to name a wish. Nolan began his inspection methodically, tracing wires, checking sensor readouts, cross-referencing part numbers against the maintenance history displayed on a tablet. Something about the failure pattern struck him as wrong because three separate systems were reporting critical faults simultaneously, yet the underlying mechanical readings did not match the severity the software claimed. He suspected, quietly at first, that someone had engineered these failures deliberately to keep the aircraft grounded rather than allowing an accident to occur naturally.
The kind of layered fault he was looking at rarely happened by accident since a genuine mechanical breakdown almost always left a trail of smaller warning signs in the days before it surfaced, and this aircraft had none of that history. Instead, the failures had appeared all at once, clean and simultaneous, the kind of pattern that came from someone who understood the system well enough to make a lie look exactly like the truth. Nolan had seen this kind of manufactured emergency only once before in his career, and the memory of it settled into his stomach like a stone even before he had any proof to back up the feeling. Evelyn's patience thinned further, convinced he was stalling to inflate his fee, and she instructed her assistant to prepare a contract offering triple his usual rate if the jet was airworthy within 40 minutes. Nolan barely reacted to the money, asking instead to see the original maintenance records rather than the summary Evelyn's staff had printed for him.
When she refused, citing internal confidentiality, he told her plainly that if she wanted him to repair something someone else was trying to hide, she would have to let him look exactly where that person did not want her looking. It was a