Tell Maya it wasn’t her fault, he had said, to a flight controller he would never meet, in the last clear seconds of his life.

The controls locked up.

She did everything right.

And then the page had nothing more on it, because there had been nothing more, because that was what he had chosen to spend his final breath saying.

Maya read it once, and then again, and the eighteen months came apart in her chest all at once, the guilt she had built her whole diminished life around dissolving against four plain sentences from a man who had known the truth even as he fell.

He had not blamed her.