He Sent the Helicopter for Her Dog, So I Took Back My Wings novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Like
Eleven days after her grandmother died on a burning road, Gianna likes the photo of the woman who ignored her calls, then packs in nine minutes and gives her husband the urn. Celia steps out of the elevator behind him with the dog.
My grandmother died on a fire road at 4:17 in the morning, with her cheek against my neck.
My husband's rescue helicopter was four minutes away.
He had sent it to save his first love's dog.
That was eleven days ago.
Tonight I sat in our penthouse with my hands wrapped in gauze to the wrists, and I read his texts.
The first one said: Celia tells me the ops line has been quiet. Good.
I had stopped calling that line the night nobody answered it.
Leonard took that to mean I had learned some manners.
The second one said: I booked the jet north for your grandmother's birthday on the 30th. She can finally see the vineyards. You're welcome.
My grandmother's urn stood on the mantel, three feet from my chair.
She had been in it for nine days.
The third text came while I was still holding the phone with two fingers.
A brush fire is not a hurricane, Gianna. The ranch was insured. Stop hiding in a hotel and come home.
There was no hotel.
There had been a burn unit in Van Nuys, and a nurse who changed my dressings twice a day.
She had told me a tall man in a flight jacket left a paper cup of tea outside my door every morning.
He never gave his name, and I decided he had the wrong room.
Leonard did not know any of it, because in eleven days he had not once called me himself.
In his family I did not have a husband.
I had a dispatch desk, and her name was Celia Rask.
She was his girlfriend from Stanford, widowed at thirty and hired back as Sutton Aviation's head of flight operations at thirty-one.
She ran his calendar, his fleet and every call I made to him.
After nine at night his cell phone forwarded to her, and in launch weeks it forwarded all day.
"If it's real, Celia will know," he told me once, at a dinner for sixty, swirling his wine.
"My wife sees an emergency in every cloud. Celia sees the weather."
Everybody laughed, and so did I.
By then I was very good at it.
At 8:30 that night, Celia posted a photo from the Sentinel gala.
She stood in emerald silk with a white Pomeranian in her arms, and Leonard's hand rested on her waist.
The caption said: When the fire came, he sent his helicopter for us. Family is who comes for you.
The dog was named Countess.
Six months ago that photo would have broken me.
I screenshotted it, and I pressed like.
Leonard texted back inside three minutes.
For her he was always fast.
Celia ran ops flawlessly through the worst fire season of my career. Don't be petty.
Then he sent an order: Since you liked it, comment something gracious. From both of us.
All right.
I typed with my two good fingertips, because the rest were still wrapped.
Celia Rask always comes for family. Except at 3:41 a.m. on the fourteenth.
Ask her why my text says Read.
Ask her where Sentinel One was at 4:09.
I set the phone face down on the arm of the chair and stood up.
My go-bag already sat by the door.
I packed the rest in nine minutes.
My grandmother's rosary went in first, then my old flight logbook.
Then the helmet from my rescue days, dented on the left side, with one word stenciled across the back.
RAVEN.
In six years Leonard had never asked me what it meant.
The last thing in the bag was the divorce petition, signed on Monday with a pen taped between my bandaged fingers.
Everything else in that apartment belonged to Sutton Aviation.
I put my wedding ring on the mantel beside the urn.
Headlights swept across the windows of the penthouse.
For eleven days he had not come to find me.
For one comment about her, he had left the gala in eight minutes.
I heard the elevator open, then his shoes in the hall, quick and heavy.
Leonard came through the door with his tie pulled loose and his phone still in his hand.
"Delete it," he said. "Now. People are screenshotting it."
I held up my wrapped hands so he could see them.
He looked at the gauze, and then at my face, and he frowned.
"What happened to your hands?"
"The fire happened," I said.
I took the papers out of the bag and set them in his palm.
He did not read them.
He never read anything he signed.
"Gianna, this is a stunt. Celia told me the ranch was fine and Nonna is settled in a care home. Get your coat. We'll talk in the car."
I walked to the mantel and lifted the urn in both arms, the way I had carried her down the road.
"She isn't in a care home, Leonard."
He stared at the brass.
"She can't see the vineyards," I said. "So I'm taking her myself."
Behind him the elevator chimed again.
Celia stepped into the hall in emerald silk, with the dog under her arm.
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