She would watch it climb and some part of her would be back in that other sky, watching a different aircraft that did not level off, that kept going down when it should have come up, and she would feel again the helplessness and the certainty of her own failure, and she would have to look away.

It had been one of the reasons she stopped going near airfields at all.

The sky had become a place where she was always, forever, about to lose him again.

She watched the training jet climb and level off and bank gently away toward the practice area, and the ghost did not come.

She waited for it, almost braced for it, and what came instead was only the plain clean pleasure of watching a flying machine do the thing it was built to do, lift off the earth and carry people safely up into the light.

Gabriel was still gone.