It was better than that life, and it had taken nearly losing everything to let her see it, and she did not intend to waste the seeing.

She was aware that there was a version of her story the world would have preferred, the one where the hero of the Atlantic went back to the cockpit of a fighter and resumed being exceptional, and she understood the appeal of it and felt not the smallest pull toward it.

The young woman who had chased the sharp edge of the profession, who had needed to be the best in the formation and had measured herself against it daily, had been real and had not been wrong, exactly, but had also been running on something she could see clearly now from the far side of grief: a belief that her worth was the same thing as her performance, that she was only as valuable as her last flight.

The sky had nearly cured her of that belief the hard way.