Page 110 of When We Had Forever
He flinches. I consider rephrasing, but this isn’t the time for pulling punches. It’s time for us to drag every ugly, cringing truth into the light.
“In a way,” he says, “you could say we both did.”
“How? How’d she die?”
“We...had an airplane.”
I nod. Somehow, I knew this would have something to do with it.
“Michael funded it, but I built it. Which worked out—he had the money, I had the time. And we both loved to fly. Cars, planes, whatever. If it went fast, we liked it. Except when I built us that plane, I put the boost pump switch in a different place than he was used to. In our first one, it’d been on the panel. In the second, I put it on the joystick. But I forgot to tell him about the change. And one day when he and Lily headed down to Oregon for the weekend, the mechanical pump failed. Which shouldn’t have been that big of a deal. They would’ve been fine if he’d just found the damn switch. But he didn’t. He looked all over and didn’t know where it was, and they crashed. He lived. She died.”
Silence blossoms between my ears. So much of that has gone right over my head. “You’re a pilot?”
“Was. I haven’t flown since Lily died.”
“And you built a plane? Justbuilta plane? Like that’s a normal thing that people do?”
“It’s really not that hard.”
I gape at him. “And Michael was a pilot, too.”
“Yes.”
“Who crashed. And killed somebody. Which is why he was so terrified to fly.”
He gives me a sad, spare smile, and waits for me to sort the facts into their proper columns and rows.
“I don’t know anything about airplanes,” I eventually say. “But it seems like...if Michael was the one flying, shouldn’t he have, I don’t know, figured out where everything was before takeoff? Isn’t there a checklist, or something?”
Grayson laces his fingers between his knees. “There is. At least there’ssupposedto be. And you could argue that it was his fault for skipping it. But if I’d just put the stupid button in the place he was used to, none of it would’ve happened. Lily would still be alive. Michael never would’ve blamed me for the crash. He never would’ve started drinking, never would’ve started hating me so much... So many things could’ve been avoided.”
“And you and I never would’ve met.”
A sharp, blue-green glitter leaps in his eyes. “No. And trust me, I’ve already tortured myself into circles with that one. A million times.”
“Okay. But I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me who you were, once we got to Seattle.”
His look turns rueful. “That’s even easier. Because I wanted to impress you. I saw your reaction when you walked into Michael’s condo. That place wowed you.”
I think back. I would’ve been too self-righteous to admit it at the time, but... “Okay, yeah, it did. But that had nothing to do with why you became the love of my life.”
He stems a breath, and my gut clenches when I realize what I’ve said. But he moves on, leaving it blessedly alone.
“Iwasgoing to tell you.” His burnt rasp tugs at something inside me. “That last day. I was going to take you to my real apartment, the one with the taped-up Ansel Adams posters and the twin bed with the busted spring. I was going to explain everything, make love to you if you’d’ve let me, then put you on a plane to Greece.”
Pieces click together in my head. “You meanthatwas the big secret? The thing you were going to tell me before we slept together?”
“That was it.”
I press my lips together and drag a breath through my nose. That line Michael fed me about being an alcoholic...true, but also a lie. “Except you went to jail that day.”
“Yeah. Though Michael must’ve told you the story inside-out. It took me forever to figure out what was happening, what he’d said to you. But yeah, I got into a fight trying to defend some woman I didn’t even know, and when I got booked, all I could think about was making sure you still caught your flight. Michael was checking out of his program that day, which was where I’d gone. To pick him up. But instead, I had to use my phone call to explain everything to him, and hepromisedme, Mina. Even though things were still terrible between us, I’d just done him this two-month-long favor, and he said he’d walk to the condo if he had to. Find a way to get you to Sea-Tac. And at first, I had no way to know he hadn’t done that, because I didn’t get released until the next day.”
I worry at my lip with my teeth. “But when you did get out? Why didn’t you call me?”
His gaze softens. “I did. Right away. But you want to know what happened? What still happens?”
I lean forward. I can’t seem to help myself. “What?”
