The engine noise climbed and thinned and faded out over the field, and I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding since a black night over the Atlantic, and I smiled, and I said it quietly to no one and to Gabriel and to myself.

“I’m home.”

And I was.

Not home the way I’d been home in a squadron ready room years ago, young and certain and untouched by anything — that home was gone, and the girl who’d lived there with it.

This was a different home, one I’d had to lose everything and cross an ocean and land a dying airplane to find: the plain, hard-won peace of a person who has met the worst day of her life, and survived it, and decided to keep flying anyway — not despite the ghosts, but with them, carried gently now instead of dragged.

The sky was just the sky again.

It would hold me up.

It always had.