Chapter 1
One
“Favorful” odds.
Some mornings, I stood on the back porch before anyone else woke up, wrapped in a fleece hoodie, staring at the sliver of sky above the rooftops and watching the clouds move and the light change.
I told myself I was checking the weather.
Old habit. But the truth was that I missed being part of it.
Not the flying itself, but the way I used to feel: like I was made of the same elements that moved the clouds. Now I had no clue what I was made of.
Flying used to mean everything to me; lately, it has mainly made me feel small. It felt like the sky had taken something from me and hadn’t given it back.
My hands stayed steady, but only because I forced them to. Sometimes I found it hard to know whether I hadn’t heard things because I had caught myself daydreaming or because the hearing in my left ear had never truly returned.
Inside, the kettle clicked off. I poured the water slowly, watching the steam curl upward like breath. “Small pleasures,” Dr. Michaels—my therapist—always said. Find the moments that remind you you’re alive. Steam. Tea. The shuffle of someone waking up upstairs. Small pleasures, right?
Footsteps thundered down the stairs like a one-man stampede.
Enter my younger brother, Adam. Much taller than me now, although I still call him “kid”.
His hair stuck up at odd angles, and his sweatshirt was on backwards.
He’d turned seventeen four months ago, but I can’t say I remember much from that day.
“You’re up early,” he said through a yawn, grabbing the milk from the fridge.
“So are you, kid.”
“I have a math test.”
“Ah.” I sipped. “May the odds be ever in your favor.” (Yes. We used to watch Hunger Games together. Adam kept on calling me Katnip, mainly because he couldn’t pronounce “s” properly until he turned six… or eight).
He snorted and dropped into a chair. “You know I don’t need favorful odds, my mathematically-challenged sister.”
I nodded. “First of all, I knew calculus when you were still peeing all over your bed, and—wait a second—did you just say FAVORFUL?”
“I’m also linguistically creative, if you didn’t know.”
Adam tapped his spoon against the rim of his cereal bowl for a few seconds without looking up. “Do you think you’ll ever go back?”
The words hit like a cold breeze through an open door. I didn’t answer right away.
I stirred my tea with the back of a spoon instead, watching the leaf particles swirl slowly.
“To what?”
“You know,” Adam said again, this time lowering his voice for drama. “There.”
He nodded vaguely toward the window, like the sky was just a few inches past the fridge. I opened my mouth, but the truth caught in my throat. I couldn’t say no. That would mean it was over. Like really, truly over. But saying yes felt like a lie.
“I don’t know,” I wanted to say. It would have been honest. But honesty scraped too close to something raw, so I took the scenic route.
“You mean go where people voluntarily leave the ground and hurl themselves at gravity with only wings made of plastic and trust?”
He grinned. “That’s the one.”
Adam had our dad’s eyebrows and my mother’s mouth.
Same sharp cheekbones as me, blond hair, same hazel eyes, though his had stayed the same warm gold year-round, while mine always looked greener in winter.
Everyone said we had the same smile, which was unfortunate for him, because I hadn’t used mine properly in months.
He had a light scar just above his left brow from when I dared him to jump off the porch railing when he was seven. A fact he liked to bring up whenever I needed humbling.
“Anyway,” he said, shoveling cereal into his mouth. “Just asking. No pressure. Except the kind that builds slowly over time and causes people to explode.”
I raised my mug. “Spoken like someone who’s definitely going to ace his math test.”
“Spoken like someone who definitely isn’t avoiding their life.”
I raised an eyebrow.
He backpedaled instantly. “I meant me. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
He stood and left his bowl exactly where it was. “Love you, sis.”
“Love you too, kid.”
I rinsed my mug and Adam’s abandoned bowl, listening to him stomp up the stairs, already late, already humming some tuneless melody under his breath. For someone who claimed to hate mornings, my brother carried enough noise and light to fill the whole town.
The house went quiet again, the kind of quiet that made you notice every creak in the floorboards. I wiped my hands on a towel and stepped into the living room.
Dad was already there. He always was, at least until Hannah, his nurse and caregiver, arrived.
He sat near the window, as usual, his chair angled slightly so he could see the sky between the tree branches.
He wasn’t reading, wasn’t doing anything, just sitting with his hands resting in his lap, the early light casting soft shadows over his face.
His flight jacket hung on the back of his chair, still smelling faintly of leather and fuel, and years gone by.
“Hey,” I said.
He looked over and gave me a small smile. “Hey.”
We didn’t hug much anymore. I wasn’t sure if that was because of him or me, or us.
“You’re up early,” he said, voice quiet but warm.
I nodded. “Melatonin just makes my legs all twitchy at night, and without it, I can’t sleep. Also figured I’d catch Adam before he exploded from math anxiety.”
He chuckled. “Poor kid. He got your mom’s brain, though. He’ll be fine.”
I crossed my arms loosely, leaning against the doorway. “She left me with the glider obsession and a questionable sense of humour.”
“You both got the stubbornness,” he added, lifting his brow.
I smiled. “Genetic curse.”
There was a beat of silence. The kind that used to be comfortable between us, before everything changed. Now it felt like a breath held too long.
“Did you see the sky this morning?” he asked, glancing upward. “Clear. Light wind. Good thermals.”
“I noticed,” I said.
He didn’t say I should fly. He didn’t need to. He never did. But he left the door open every time.
I pulled the sleeves of my sweatshirt down over my hands. The scars on them were still healing. “I haven’t decided.” Lie.
He nodded slowly, like that was enough. But I saw his hand curl slightly against the armrest, the almost imperceptible sigh. We never talked about my hearing loss. Or the scars. Or how hard it still was to sleep.
Sometimes I caught him looking at my left hand: the one that trembled slightly when I was tired or overwhelmed. He never said anything. That was his way: quiet pride, quiet grief.
There was still a picture of my mom on the windowsill: her in aviators and wind-whipped hair, laughing into the sun.
Some days, I hated that photo. Not because I missed her: well, I did, after she left—but because I didn’t know what she would have said if she’d been here after the accident.
If she would’ve been angry. Or afraid. Or just practical, like always.
“She would’ve told me to get back in the cockpit,” I muttered, not even sure why.
“Yeah,” he said. “She probably would have.”
I heard him shift slightly in his chair: the soft mechanical whirr and click of the wheelchair reminded me of my dad’s diabetes, obviously, but also that I was so, so very proud of him for taking every day with such grace, even after Mom left.
Later, he had to take care of me after I left the hospital.
Hannah would arrive around ten. Until then, he was always up, always dressed, even if getting from the bedroom to the living room window took twice as long as it used to.
“I checked the mailbox yesterday,” he changed the topic. “Another letter from the bank.”
“Let me guess: ‘We regret to inform you that your balance remains tragically unpaid’?”
He cracked a smile. “Close enough.”
“I won’t be needing therapy forever, so we won’t have to worry about insurance not fully covering that.”
“And Adam?” he added, hesitating.
“He’ll be fine; push comes to shove, he’ll go to a university somewhere in Saskatoon and not Stanford. But might need a new hoodie that doesn’t look like it’s been chewed by a labrador.”
Dad smiled, but somehow that smile didn’t reach his eyes, and my heart was breaking for him.
“I’ll make it work, Dad,” I said. “You remember Uncle Tom’s offer to get me that assistant job?”
He gave me a look. “You’re not going to work for Tommo Ferry Services 4U.”
“Why not? It’s glorified paper-pushing with ocean views.”
“You were born for more than printer toner and corporate mantras.”
“Well, right now, I need more than dreams. I need physio. And rent money. And a life that doesn’t collapse when Hannah takes a day off.”
He didn’t argue. His smile was quiet, but real. “God, you sound like your mother. Always practical.”
“Terrifying, isn’t it?”
“I’m proud of you,” he said after a long pause. “I keep replaying that day and always wish… I could have, no, should have done more for you. You don’t have to give up the sky to survive down here.”
I swallowed past the knot in my throat. “Don’t tell Adam. He thinks he’s the golden child.”
What I really wanted to say is: I’m afraid. Of this job. The building. That they’ll become permanent, that I’ll never soar so many feet above it all.
What if I’ve changed too much to fly again?
But maybe this was what sacrifice looked like. Not dramatic. Not noble. Just… necessary. Folding the dream into a drawer marked for later.
I grabbed my coat, the one that didn’t quite cover the scar peeking from my collar.
“Favorful odds,” I thought with a thoughtful smile, and stepped into the day.