Too Late to Win Me Back, Mr. Billionaire novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Below Minimums

Darcy talks Sawyer into flying Kit to Boston through the fog, and at the hospital the coordinator tells her the family called at 9:41 and declined the lungs.

Sawyer didn't give me the keys.

He didn't shut the door either.

"You haven't flown in five years," he said.

"Five years and two months."

"Your medical's lapsed."

"So's my patience."

He almost smiled. Then he looked at the fog again and it went away.

"The ceiling's two hundred feet. I can't see the end of my own runway."

"You don't need to see it. It's twenty-six hundred feet, dead straight, and the Hen's off the ground in nine hundred with a light load."

He blinked.

"Rockland's clear," I said. "I checked on the run. The fog's sitting on us and nowhere else. The moment the wheels leave, you're above it."

"And coming home?"

"You don't come home tonight. You land in Boston."

"Who taught you all this?"

"Your grandfather. On that bench right there. Every summer until I was eighteen."

I pointed at the bench by the fuel pump where his grandfather used to sit with his coffee and his crossword and a girl who wouldn't go home.

Sawyer looked at the bench for a long second.

Then he grabbed a jacket off the hook and threw it at me.

"Put shoes on. There's boots in the back. Go get your sister."

I could have kissed him.

I ran instead.

His old truck was parked by the hangar with the keys in it, because this was Thatch Island and nobody had ever stolen a truck here.

I drove to Tern Lane with the window down, fog wet on my face.

The porch light was on.

Kit was on the couch in her flannel pajamas with a sketchbook on her knees and the oxygen line looped over her ears.

The home nurse was asleep in the armchair.

Kit looked up at me. At the dress, the jacket, the boots.

"Oh no," she said. "Did you finally murder him?"

"They have lungs."

Her pencil stopped.

"Real ones?"

"Real ones. In Boston. Tonight."

She didn't cry. Kit never cried first.

She just held out her arms.

I picked her up, blanket and all.

She weighed ninety-one pounds. I knew because I wrote it down every morning.

The nurse woke up and grabbed the portable tank and her own coat without a word.

Sawyer had the Hen out of the hangar by the time we got back, her red-and-white nose pointed into the white.

He'd switched on the runway lights. They made little smudged halos in the fog, and then nothing.

He took Kit from me at the cargo door, careful as a man carrying eggs.

Kit studied his beard from six inches away.

"Is this the hangar boy?"

"Kit."

"The one you had the crush on? The summer you were seventeen and wrote his name on the..."

"Kit, I swear to God."

Sawyer settled her in a seat in the back and buckled her in.

"Wrote it on the what?" he asked.

"The hull of the dinghy. In nail polish. Dad was so mad."

"I remember that dinghy," Sawyer said. "I thought it was a different Sawyer."

"There's only one Sawyer on this island," Kit said.

"I know," he said. "I was being polite."

The nurse climbed in beside her and hooked the tank to the wall.

I climbed into the right seat.

It smelled exactly the same. Old leather and coffee and fuel.

My hands knew where everything was before my head did.

Sawyer ran his checks fast and calm, calling out each one.

I answered him without thinking.

He glanced at me sideways.

"Still got it."

"Fly the plane, Kinney."

He pushed the throttle forward.

The Hen roared and leaned and ran into the white.

The lights flicked past, one, two, three, then the nose came up and the ground let go.

For a few seconds there was nothing in the windshield. Not sky, not water. Just gray.

I watched the instruments and counted under my breath.

Then the fog thinned, and tore, and fell away under us like a sheet pulled off a bed.

Stars.

A whole sky of them, and the lights of Rockland on the coast, and the moon on top of the fog bank behind us.

From the back, over the engine, Kit whooped through her oxygen line.

Sawyer's shoulders came down.

"Well," he said. "Okay then."

I put my forehead against the cold window and closed my eyes.

We flew south down the coast for an hour.

Kit fell asleep. The nurse watched her numbers.

Sawyer didn't ask me anything about the party, or the bare feet, or the helicopter he must have heard go over.

He handed me a thermos of coffee instead.

It was the worst coffee I'd ever tasted.

I drank all of it.

Boston rose up out of the dark, all glass and red lights.

The tower cleared us straight in.

There was an ambulance on the ramp with its doors open.

They had Kit on a stretcher in two minutes and in the hospital in twenty.

Sawyer came with us. I didn't ask him to. He just tied the Hen down and climbed into the ambulance behind me.

It was eleven fifty-two when we ran through the doors of the transplant floor.

We'd made it with an hour to spare.

The transplant coordinator was waiting at the desk, a gray-haired woman in a cardigan with a clipboard against her chest.

She looked at Kit on the stretcher.

Then she looked at me, and her face changed.

"Mrs. Delano," she said. "I don't understand. What are you doing here?"

"We're here for the lungs. You called me."

"Yes. And then your family called us back."

"What?"

She checked the clipboard.

"At nine forty-one. A woman from your family's office. She said Kit was too sick to travel and you were declining the offer."

Behind me, Sawyer went very still.

"We already called the next patient on the list," she said.

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