“No,” I made my voice softer. “I’m asking about yours. The real one.”
He swallowed and didn’t answer for a moment. “First tell me what you do know. Beyond what Dom and Enzo have told you about me.”
I considered this. “Honestly? Mostly what I’ve seen in movies. Aircraft carriers, deployments, call signs that usually sound cooler than they probably are in real life,” I began tracing another line of his tattoo. Wax dripping from a candle around the falling mortal form. “Why?”
“Because if someone asks you about my service, you should probably say more than ‘he flies jets like Top Gun,’” a shadow crossed his face. “And there are details about what happened that, if we’re doing this, you should know.”
He was quiet for a long moment, his breathing steady beneath my cheek. When he finally spoke, his voice carried a detached tone, like he was debriefing someone on a mission rather than sharing something personal.
“I learned to fly on my grandfather’s plane when I was around fourteen. Ol’ Piper Cub that had no business still being airborne,” his fingers resumed a gentle movement down my back. “But being up there… it was the only place that made sense. Everything on the ground felt chaotic, unpredictable, and boring at the same time. In the air, there were rules. Physics. Cause ‘n’ effect. I was an adrenaline junkie since birth, but somethin’ about the rules, and the consequences of ignorin’ them, gave me a thrill like nothin’ I’d ever experienced.”
I kept tracing the lines of his tattoo, following the careful detail work of the wings, noting the way his drawl was more pronounced when talking about the past. “So you joined up to keep flying?”
“That was part of it. The other part was wantin’ to matter. To do something that required the best of what I had to offer.” He paused. “Twin thing, maybe. Dom was already talkin’ about acting by the time we were fifteen, ‘bout being someone people would notice for what he could do, not who he was. I wanted to be essential in a different way.”
His thumb traced along my shoulder blade. “And I didn’t wanna stay in Wyoming,” he admitted. “Everyone expected me to take over part of ranch operations, marry Lou, have a couple kids, and call it a life. Good life, probably. Safe life. But the idea of knowin’ exactly what the next forty or fifty years’d look like made me feel like I was suffocating.”
I felt him take a deeper breath, “Lou didn’t understand why I’d want to leave when I had everything she thought I needed right there. Neither did my parents, really. But I needed to find out who I could become if I wasn’t just Nolan Walker’s son from North Star Ranch. Dominick Walker’s brother.”
“And you’re a… Commander?”
“Wasa Lieutenant Commander,” his jaw ticked. “Twelve years to get there, sooner than most. And gone a year later.”
I reached my arm around his side, anchoring myself to him the same way he was holding me.
“Did you get a call sign right away?”
“In flight school. ‘Steady,’” his voice shifted, tightened in a way I hadn’t heard before. “I could land on a carrier in rough seas when other pilots were wavin’ off. Never lost my cool, never broke under pressure. Other pilots wanted me as their leader because I was—”
He stopped abruptly, jaw clenching.
“Because you were steady,” I finished gently.
“Yeah,” the word came out rough. “For thirteen years, that’s who I was. Steady. Reliable. The guy who could hold formationwhen everything went to shit, who could bring his bird and his squad home no matter what.”
I felt him swallow hard. “And then one day I couldn’t. One day I became the guy who couldn’t save his wingman. Who couldn’t even save himself and spent eighteen weeks in a hospital just to earn a medical discharge.”
My hand splayed over his back. “Finn...”
“They don’t call you ‘Steady’ when your hands shake durin’ a basic flight readiness test,” he whispered, his careful control starting to crack. “When your depth perception is shot and you can’t remember the radio frequencies you’ve used for over a decade. When the thought of putting on your helmet and getting back in a cockpit makes you break out in a cold sweat.”
The pain in his voice made my chest ache and my throat tight. I shifted up on my elbow so I could see his face properly, my fingers finding the scar that bisected his left eyebrow and disappeared into his hairline only to reemerge across his ear. I understood what his hair and beard were hiding now. “You survived something that could have killed you. Should have killed you. That doesn’t make you less than who you were.”
“Doesn’t it?” Glassy eyes met mine, and I saw the question he’d been carrying before he voiced it. “What do you do when the thing that defined you for most of your adult life just… crashes and burns?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” the words came out before I’d fully formed the thought, but they were still true. I shifted closer, my hand moving to cup his cheek, thumb brushing along the edge of another scar. “Maybe not in the same way, but I know that feeling.”
His eyes searched mine, questioning. I had to look away, so I traced his scars.
“I was thirty-seven when I was diagnosed with ADHD,” I said quietly. “Shortly before everything with Graham happened. Thirty-seven years of thinking I was just scattered, or difficult, or lazy, sometimes stupid and clever at the same time, or that my brain was broken in some fundamental way that I needed to hide fromeveryone because nobody understood.” I traced the line of his jaw with my fingertip. “Tabitha, my assistant, was the one who finally said something. Told me she’d been watching me for months, seeing all these patterns and signs, and maybe I should talk to someone.”
Finn’s arm tightened around my waist, pulling me closer. I nestled down against his chest again.
“And suddenly everything I thought I knew about myself got turned upside down. All those careful systems I’d built, all the ways I’d learned to function. Turns out they weren’t character flaws I was managing. They were accommodations I’d created instinctively.” I took a shaky breath. “But then I had to figure out who I really was underneath all of that. If my hypercontrol wasn’t me being uptight, if my need for routines wasn’t me being inflexible, if my brain going a million miles an hour was something I could never fully control... then who was I even?”
My voice had gone hoarse by the end, and I wiped at my cheek with the back of my hand. I felt his fingers in my hair again, tilting my head back. I managed to meet his eyes as he brushed a thumb across my cheek. “What did you do?”
“Started over, I guess,” I shrugged, hitching a wry smile. “Piece by piece. Some days I still don’t know. But I think maybe that’s okay. Maybe we don’t have to try to be the same person we were before. Maybe we get to decide who we become next.”
