There was a particular afternoon she would remember, though nothing happened in it, which is often the way with the afternoons that turn out to matter.

She was standing at the edge of the airfield between lessons, a travel mug going cold in her hand, watching one of the academy’s training jets lift off the long runway and climb out into a sky that was, that day, the kind of flawless high blue that the Texas plains throw up in the autumn.

And she watched it go up, and she waited, the way she had learned to wait, for the thing that always came when she watched an airplane climb.

For eighteen months, every aircraft she had seen leave the ground had carried a ghost up with it.