9. Lili
Lili
I woke up to gray light and the sound of Conrad breathing.
The storm had passed. The office was cold and the carpet had left a pattern on my hip and his arm was heavy across my waist. I felt connected to him in a way I never imagined, like I was finally a complete person.
It made the work ahead of me seem … not easier, because it was going to be terrible.
But it all felt like it had purpose now. Like I knew what my future held.
I lay still for a minute, listening to the building settle, feeling the soreness between my legs and the warmth of his chest against my back and the strange, enormous fact of what we'd done.
His phone buzzed on the desk above us.
He didn't stir. I watched his face — the stubble thicker than yesterday, the lines around his eyes smoothed out in sleep, his mouth slightly open. He looked younger. He looked like a man who'd put something down in the night and hadn't picked it back up yet.
The phone buzzed again.
I reached up carefully, trying not to wake him, and pulled it off the desk. The screen showed a missed call and a voicemail from a contact saved as WOLF.
I set the phone on the carpet between us and lay back down.
Conrad's arm tightened around me. He made a low sound and pulled me closer, his face in my hair, and I felt him surface — the shift from sleep to awareness traveling through his body like a current.
"Morning," I said.
"Mm." His hand found my hip. His thumb traced the place where the carpet had marked me. "You okay?"
"I'm okay."
"Sore?"
"A little."
He pressed his mouth to the back of my neck and held it there, and I closed my eyes and let myself have three more seconds of this before the world started.
"Your phone went off," I said. "Someone called Wolf."
He went still behind me. But it felt like a happy stillness, and not one of concern. "Tanner," he breathed.
"Who's Tanner?"
He was quiet for a beat. Then he sat up, and the cold air hit my back where his body had been, so I pulled his henley tighter around my shoulders and sat up too.
"Tanner Wolf was the pilot on my crew,” Conrad said. “In Raptor Creek. The night of the mudslide. He flew the rescue missions. I kept his bird in the air." He picked up the phone. Looked at the screen. "He checks in when there's weather. Old habit."
Conrad played the voicemail on speaker. The voice that came through was low and rough.
"Holt. Saw the front that came through your area.
Wanted to make sure you're in one piece. Call me back when you get a minute." A pause. A dog barking in the background. "Also — I got married. We’re having a … well, I guess it’s a party. Drew says she wants you there. So. Think about it.”
The voicemail ended.
Conrad set the phone down on the carpet and looked at it for a long time.
“What was all that about?” I blinked at him, noting the emotion running along his face. “That was a heck of a voicemail.”
The corner of his mouth hitched up the slightest bit. “Sounds like he met someone special.” He licked his lips and I nuzzled a bit closer. “He’s been alone for a long time.”
I watched him look at the phone and I understood that there was a whole layer of Conrad Holt I hadn't explored yet. Men he'd worked alongside. A night that had broken all of them. A life before Forge Creek that he'd sealed off and lived without for years.
"You should call him back," I said.
"I will."
"Conrad."
"Yeah."
"You said last night there were things you needed to tell me. About the crash. And Wolf, apparently.”
He looked at me. The gray light from the window caught the green in his eyes.
"Not yet," he said. "There's something I need to show you first."
He stood and pulled on his jeans and I watched the muscles in his back move and I wanted him again already, which was inconvenient given that we had a pesky crisis to manage before that was an option.
I dressed in yesterday's clothes. We crossed the asphalt to the office in the early morning cold, the sky washed clean by the storm, the mountains sharper than I'd ever seen them. The hangar was quiet. Nobody was here yet.
Conrad approached a row of lockers where the men stored their personal belongings. He grunted with effort and slid the metal out from the wall. Stooping, he pulled out a manila envelope that was thicker than the others and sealed with packing tape.
“I’ve spent years putting this together,” he said. “And I had no idea what I was going to do with it until now.” He handed it to me.
I opened it at the table by the window. Inside was a heap of hand written notes in his scrawl, receipts, invoices. The names Ashford Aviation and Blackstone Mining Corporation appeared on nearly every piece of paper. And then I saw something he’d underlined in red.
It was a memo where Ashford Aviation agreed to reduce the maintenance budget for the Blackstone fleet by eighteen percent over three years.
The reduction targeted "non-critical replacement parts" and "discretionary maintenance intervals.
" It showed a back and forth between two parties: the Blackstone director … and my father. Robert Ashford.
My hands were steady. I noticed that. I expected them to shake and they didn't.
Conrad stood by the door, his face gray as he brought it all back to the surface. “The tail rotor … it was flagged for replacement four months before the crash. The parts never got ordered. The budget had been cut."
"My father cut corners and a plane went down.”
“And people died.”
I put the document down on the table. I looked at it. My father's name on a piece of paper that had, by a chain of decisions and omissions and cost savings that probably looked reasonable in a boardroom, killed people.
"The official report called it mechanical failure. Which is true, but the insurance papers don’t mention that it was avoidable.”
“And my father benefitted from the insurance payout…” I sat with that. The file room was cold. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead. Through the window I could see the mountains, pink at the peaks where the sun was starting to hit.
"Conrad."
"Yeah."
"The men who survived the crash. What about their settlements?”
"Low. While they were still in shock. Sign here, don't talk about it, take the money, go away."
"And you signed."
"I did.”
"Because you thought you'd missed something on inspection."
He was quiet for a long time.
"I went over it a thousand times," he said.
"Every inspection. Every checklist. Every time I touched that bird. I couldn't find the moment I should have caught it. Two years I carried that. And once I put together enough of a paper trail, I understood there was nothing to catch except someone else’s greed.”
I stood up. I crossed the room to where he was standing by the door. I put my hands on his face, feeling his stubble and the warmth of his body beneath my skin. "My father did this."
Conrad swallowed, his eyes looking tortured. I nodded. “I’m going to fix it."
He covered my hands with his. His palms were rough and warm and I felt the scars on his knuckles against my fingers.
"I know you are," he said.
I kissed him slow and purposefully as the mountains turned pink outside the window. The full weight of my decision settled onto my shoulders, but I felt lighter than before I arrived.
When I pulled back, his eyes were wet. He didn't look away from me.
I understood that Conrad Holt was part of me now, that I was sent here not to tick a box and earn a payout, but to find him, to expose the truth, to bring justice and right a wrong. And if I was lucky, I’d walk away with the greatest prize of all. This man.