Page 286 of The Lies We Play

The cockpit door closes behind them.

I sit.

I buckle.

I look out the small window at the Tuscan dark and the runway lights and the absence of everything I have ever paid attention to before from this angle.

The engines spool up.

Yes. That is the word.

The sound builds low through the cabin floor, more vibration than noise at first, then a rising force under my feet and in the seat beneath me. The plane begins to move. It picks up speed faster than a commercial aircraft does, and my body presses back into the leather as if the future has put a hand on my sternum and shoved.

The nose lifts.

The cabin tilts.

Florence falls away under my left wing in a smear of yellow light that becomes, briefly, the entire city.

Then we bank west.

The city slips behind me.

The Atlantic waits ahead.

The seat belt sign clicks off.

For a while, I do nothing.

I sit in a cabin built for comfort and feel none of it.

Then I open my bag.

I take out the burner.

The satellite phone is in the cabinet by my seat, where Derek said it would be. I look at it. I look at the burner. I look at the Wi-Fi indicator on the small screen mounted in the cabinet, which has just come on.

I choose to open the laptop.

I connect.

There is one notification waiting for me on the burner.

Creed’s number.

Two words.

I’m here.

My hand covers my mouth before I realize I’ve moved.

Not crying.

Not yet.

Something worse.

Believing.