He Sent the Helicopter for Her Dog, So I Took Back My Wings novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Lobby

In front of the doorman Leonard says Rosa was moved to a care home and Celia says nobody was hurt; Gianna shows the thirty-eight calls and is cut off at the elevator, where a pilot in a Sutton badge calls her Raven.

"Oh, Gianna," Celia said. "Your poor hands."

She said it softly, with the dog tucked under her chin.

Leonard turned to look at her, then back at the urn I was holding.

"Celia, you told me Rosa was settled in a care home."

"She was moved from the ranch that morning," Celia said. "The county paramedics took her. I put her in the system myself."

I did not move.

Across the hall a door opened and the neighbor from 12B stood in her robe, holding her phone.

She did not pretend to be doing anything else.

"My report from the fourteenth says zero Sentinel casualties," Celia said to Leonard. "Every member on that ridge was evacuated."

"My grandmother wasn't on your report," I said. "She was on a road."

"Then something went wrong with the county," Celia said, gently. "Leonard, she's been through a trauma. Don't let her drive tonight."

I took my phone out of my jacket.

My thumb was clumsy in the gauze, but I got the screen open.

I held it up at Leonard's eye level.

"Thirty-eight calls to your family ops line between 2:40 and 3:50."

He looked at the list.

He did not look away from it, and that was new.

"Thirty-eight," he said.

"One of them was answered," I said. "At 2:51 she told me it was a smoke advisory and to close the windows."

"It was an advisory," Celia said. "The county order for the ridge didn't come until 4:20. I can pull the log, Len. At 2:51 there was no evacuation."

"At 3:41 I texted you," I said to her.

I turned the phone so he could see the next screen.

Nonna can't breathe. Please.

Under it, one word in small gray letters.

Read.

Leonard stared at it.

"Celia?"

"I get four hundred messages in a launch week, Len," Celia said. "I can't answer every panic text from every member's wife."

"I'm not a member's wife," I said. "I'm his."

Nobody laughed.

The neighbor lifted her phone a little higher.

Leonard rubbed his jaw with the heel of his hand.

I knew that move.

He did it when a sum came out wrong and he wanted it to come out right.

"Gianna, you can say a lot of things," he said. "But Celia ran that whole night. Without her, forty families don't get out."

"Forty families got out," I said. "She didn't."

"Who?"

"Nonna."

He closed his eyes for a second.

Then he opened them and held out both hands.

"Give her to me. She goes in the family plot at Sutton Hills. We'll do it properly."

"Properly," I said.

"With a priest and a car."

"I carried her down a mountain with no car," I said. "She stays with me."

He lowered his hands slowly.

"Then listen to me, because I'll say it once. You walk out of here with that, you walk out with nothing."

"I know."

"The cards are Sutton's. The phone is Sutton's. The apartment is Sutton's."

"I know that too."

He took out his own phone and tapped it twice, standing there in front of her.

My phone buzzed in my hand, went dark, and showed me a white logo.

The cards would be dead too, I guessed, and I did not care.

I put the phone on the hall table beside the key bowl.

Then I picked up the go-bag with my forearm and slid the strap over my shoulder.

"The ring is on the mantel," I said.

"Gianna." For a second he sounded like the man I had married in a courthouse. "It was a brush fire."

"It was a fire road," I said. "You'll find out what the difference is."

Celia took one step toward me with a hand out.

"Honey, let me drive you somewhere safe."

"Where were you at 4:09?" I asked her.

Her face did not change.

"At the gala, sweetheart. With Leonard. Everyone saw me."

"Everyone did," I said.

I walked past her and past the dog, which showed me its teeth.

Behind me I heard Leonard say, low, "Tell me again what the log says."

I did not hear her answer.

The elevator was still open from when she had stepped out.

I stepped in with the urn against my chest and pressed the lobby button with my elbow.

The doors began to slide.

A hand came in between them and stopped them.

It was a big hand with a pilot's watch on the wrist, and the sleeve above it was brown leather.

The doors opened again.

A tall man in a worn flight jacket stood in the hall with a Sutton Aviation badge clipped to his collar.

His hazel eyes went to my gauze, then to the urn, and then to my face.

He had not shaved in a day or two, and there was a scar through his left eyebrow I did not remember.

I remembered the rest of him.

I had taught him to work a hoist once, in a hangar in Ojai, before I married the man who owned his paycheck.

"Hello, Raven," he said.

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