It is easy to be done with the sky in a grocery store, in a school pickup line, in all the ordinary rooms where nothing is falling and no one is dying.

The resolution only gets weighed when the thing it refuses is actually, finally, in front of you, asking.

And hers had been weighed just now, in the space between a flight attendant’s question and her own answer, and it had come up exactly as light as she had secretly always feared it would.

She was not a woman who had stopped being a pilot.

She was a pilot who had been hiding from the bill.