Chapter 30 #2
She looked at Maren, seeking solace in their shared tragedy. Maren’s eyes brimmed with unshed tears, her lips twitching into a half-hearted smile—until her gaze flicked to the screen. The smile softened into something genuine.
Grier followed her line of sight as the image shifted: Jonah, wearing a captain’s hat and holding a model helicopter to the camera, beneath a banner that read, Cleared for final takeoff, crossing into blue skies. Jonah, 2013-2024.
Bile rose in her throat. Her stomach churned with the acid from a skipped breakfast, nausea having kept her from eating.
The knot in her throat refused to go down, no matter how many times she tried to swallow it.
On the screen, the portraits changed—Jonah in his favorite element, surrounded by aircraft, dressed in various costumes, striking pose after pose of pure aviation joy.
Grier’s stomach flipped. Dampness gathered in the creases of her skin, slicking her palms and running in thin trails down her back.
Her mouth went dry as the picture changed—Jonah and his family on the helipad.
The familiar helicopter loomed behind them while Jonah and Micah grinned into the camera, posing for Katie’s pictures between flights.
A faint buzzing filled her body. Her legs bounced against her will, and her vision alternated between blurred edges and drifting black dots.
She felt dangerously close to passing out.
She didn’t want to add to the chaos of the day, but she was starting to panic with how much she was struggling to breathe.
Her throat constricted with the unbearable weight of loss.
The picture changed again, shattering any illusion she had of controlling her breath.
The screen pixelated in a reverse explosion of squares before settling on Jonah’s familiar face—perched atop Tobin’s lap in the cockpit of the helicopter.
Tobin’s long mahogany curls draped around her shoulders, and Jonah wore her captain’s hat while he and Micah alternated sounding the mechanical horn.
It was a story Grier had heard on repeat for days after those flights.
There was Tobin, in that memorable pilot’s uniform, her eyes at full-gleam with mouth agape in playful surprise as the boys blared the horn.
Jonah’s smile told the whole story, perfectly mirroring Tobin’s grin—radiant and open-mouthed—his torso leaning into her in the throes of unbridled joy.
His smile was pure, and innocent, and so achingly alive. It was too much.
Grier’s stomach plummeted as bile surged up her throat.
She choked it back as she shot to her feet, clutching her hand to her mouth and hoping that the tissue she had shredded in her hands would staunch any impending fluids.
Her vision tunneled, and she tripped over Grant’s knee, then Haleigh’s, before barreling into the aisle in effort to escape the funeral.
She needed air; she needed wide, open space.
She needed to be anywhere but where she was.
She hurtled through the funeral home doors into the parking lot. She was greeted by the swirling gray clouds of a long-awaited storm.
She gasped, choking and sputtering and begging for the cool, revitalizing tendrils of oxygen to slip through her lips and slide down her throat.
Her lungs were on fire. Her stomach burned with a torrent of acid.
The tears were hot, welling over her eyelids before falling uselessly to the parched pavement.
She clutched at her heaving throat as the first precious currents of oxygen slithered their way into her lungs.
She bent over, hands on knees, dragging in breath after greedy breath.
Her name was being called—vaguely, as if from a distance.
But it was enough to center herself. She drew on years of swimming, coaching herself through the burning in her lungs as she steadied her inhale, then slowly exhaled, wiping her eye as she stood up.
The voice was closer now. She didn’t want to be confronted. She didn’t want to be found.
Grier pivoted her head, gathering a sense of location. And then—without hesitation, without any real sense of mental clarity or presence of mind—she made a decision. She ran.
Her legs carried her of their own volition, fueled by the raw ache of Tobin and Jonah and the overwhelming urgency to be anywhere but where she was propelling her forward.
The torrid heat of the dry earth licked at her tears, drying them on her cheeks.
The air carried the metallic tang of electricity, prickling her skin as she pushed forward.
Her brain didn’t know where she was going, but her legs did.
They carried her through the center of Aetheridge—passed Vinny’s, and the pier, and all the places of her youth. Places Jonah would never get to experience. Past the rock pool and the beach—her usual sanctuaries, where she would wear down her emotion grain by grain, stroke by stroke.
She ran until her thighs burned and her calves spasmed.
She ran until her mind went blank—like the water usually offered her—but with a blurred haze at the edges, like the storm that was brewing overhead, alert and ready to strike without warning.
Because no matter how far she ran, no matter where she ran, she didn’t want to chase the thoughts away.
She wanted the memories of Jonah—his smile, his laughter, his boyish bravado, and his easy, infectious love of flight.
And she wanted Tobin—in all her timid, abject emotion and her choice to finally love and be loved with reckless abandon.
She welcomed the memories of Tobin and invited the unrealized fantasies: the dreams and the ambitions and the hopes of what she and Tobin will be.
Because she knew, for certain, that Tobin was no longer a “might.” Tobin was her reality. She would be her future—their future.
And that was how she found herself at the entrance to the hiking trail where they had shared their first official date.
Her mind might not have known where she was headed, but her heart knew.
She wasn’t running from Jonah; she was running toward Tobin—in the only way that she could when the love of her life was halfway around the world.
She looked ahead at the trailhead that wound deep into the coastal forest she had spent a lifetime mapping.
She unclenched her fists, pulling her nails free from the grooves they’d left in her palms. Three steadying breaths cleared her vision and eased the tension in her shoulders.
She took one tentative step. Then another.
And with a deep, satisfying inhale of clear, crisp air, she stepped determinedly into the forest—where her heart, now certain of its direction, steadied and beat in its own comfortable rhythm.
The first lick of lightning streaked through the sky as the dense canopy swallowed the clouds from view. But she smelled it.
Grier walked at a comfortable pace—for the first time in over a week, she felt unhurried.
A quiet peace began to settle within her.
The closer she drew to the clearing, the lighter her body felt.
The loss of Jonah was behind her, left with the rest of his mourners at the funeral parlor.
Ahead of her lay Tobin. Ahead of her lay love. Ahead of her lay peace.
She knew Tobin wouldn’t be there. But she also knew she’d feel her presence all the same. When she finally broke through the tree line and stepped into the clearing, her heart stuttered in a couplet, instantly connecting to the memories of this glen—memories with Tobin.
She circled around the open space, trailing her fingers over the tops of the prairie grass, raising her face to the sky to let the wind caress her skin and erase the last traces of a week’s worth of tears.
Above her, the sky churned. She marveled in the wrath and glory of its fury, the electric charge of the storm calling to her—body and soul—until every cell seemed to lean toward it, drawn by its silent invitation.
With each passing in the clearing, she spiraled inward, working her way concentrically toward the center.
Behind her, the grasses held a trail of whorls and loops, the clearing marking its memory of her like a fingerprint.
At the center, she found the spot where she’d sat weeks ago, nestled against Tobin while fireflies danced around them.
The grass was still stamped, depressed from the imprints of their bodies—a semipermanent memory of her love.
She spun with her hands clasped at her chest, then flung them wide and screamed wildly into the abyss as the sky crackled and sizzled above her.
She screamed until her throat was raw and she tasted the familiar and distant note of blood on her tongue. She spun until she laughed, stumbling mid-turn and collapsing with a peculiar sense of grace into the grass.
On her back, clouds churning above her, she laughed and cried in the same breath.
Her fingers found the pendant at her throat, the familiar chill of the metal grounding her like it always did.
She closed her eyes and let thoughts of Tobin expand and amplify inside her mind until Tobin was all there was.
When she woke hours later, it wasn’t the cold or the wind that stirred her. It wasn’t the hunger gnawing at her stomach, nor the wail of a siren drifting from the city center miles away.
It was the smoke—thick and acrid—and the distinct, visceral certainty that the world around her was on fire. The sky had darkened with the setting sun, but the clouds had taken on the color of burning coals, streaked with lightning like the dying embers of a forgotten fire.
In the distance, still a mile or two away, flames danced. Overhead, the smoke was already dense, and as she spun her head on her shoulders, she counted at least three separate walls of dark vapor rising into the air. Aetheridge Forest was burning.
Swallowing the panic that was ebbing inside her, she dropped to her knees and began patting the ground, frantically searching for her purse—and the phone inside it.
Cell service in the forest was unreliable, but she hoped with everything she had that the clearing would provide enough satellite visibility for her to connect to an emergency call.
Her hands swept blindly through the grass, the encroaching night and thickening smoke reducing her vision to a blur and making her eyes water. A cough tore from her throat. She kept searching, her palms coming up empty over and over.
“Where is it?” she shouted, the words catching in her smoke- raw lungs. The stark realization hit like an anvil on her already compromised lungs: she hadn’t lost her purse. She’d left it at the funeral parlor.
And with it—her only chance of communication. Her only chance of rescue.
Grier swallowed hard. Her mouth was parched from the smoke—and the weight of her predicament. She needed to stay calm, but her heart and her mind raced, rapidly mapping her surroundings, tracking the likely positions of the fires, and analyzing every possible escape route.
The biggest blaze blocked her primary exit—the main trail leading east from the clearing. To the west lay the watering hole she and Tobin had jumped into on their date. North was nothing but cliffs and a four- to five-hundred-yard drop to Lake Aetheridge—a likely unsurvivable plunge.
That left the south. Smoke thickened like curtains to the southwest and southeast, but directly south, a small patch of sky looked marginally clearer.
It would take her deeper into the forest, potentially risking a broader area of forest to clear before she was able to exit—but it was the only option that wasn’t immediately lethal.
She scanned the clearing one last time, confirming what she already knew. Then, as the next gust of wind brought a faint breath of cleaner air, she filled her lungs, crouched low, and sprinted into the pocket of hopefully safe forest.