“Just get the house ready,” I said. “I’ll handle the rest.”
“Yeah. OK.” A beat. “I’ll be there when you land.”
He hung up. I looked at Charlie still watching me from the floor. Then I opened a text to Cheryl.
› Need you to find someone. Her name is Mia. Charlie’s best friend, runs an event planning business in L.A. Get her to Aspen however it takes—first class, charter, I don’t care. But don’t tell Charlie. I want it to be a surprise.
Three dots. Then: › On it.
She pressed her lips together hard, the way people do when they’re trying not to start crying again. A tear escaped anyway—she swiped at it with the back of her hand, and something about the gesture undid me. The impatience of it. The refusal to let grief win completely, even now.
This woman. This impossible, stubborn, brilliant woman who built underwater safety systems and carried a broken compass and loved a mentor who called at two a.m. about pressure differentials. Who had just lost the closest thing she had to a mother and was sitting on a floor in Roatan letting a man she’d barely known five days ago hold her while she fell apart.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Two words. They landed in my chest and stayed there. I wanted to say something back—something that matched the size of what was happening, something that acknowledged that I’d just dismantled a decade’s worth of walls in a single phone call and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
But I didn’t. Some things were too new to survive being named.
“Let’s get you packed,” I said instead. And helped her up off the floor.
The drive to the airstrip was quiet. I drove—my hands on the wheel, the headlights cutting through the jungle dark, the same road I’d driven five days ago with Charlie in the passenger seat and Jason narrating the scenery. That felt like a different life.
She’d packed a bag in ten minutes. I’d packed mine in five. Mike had appeared in the hallway as we were leaving—because Mike always knew, even when you didn’t tell him—and he’d looked at me and then at Charlie and said, “I’ve got things here. Go.”
On the jet, Charlie took the window seat and pulled her knees up the way she had on the deck. She held the compass in one hand. Her phone—Wyatt still hadn’t called back—in the other.
Adam had the engines running. We were wheels up in under twenty minutes.
Charlie fell asleep somewhere over the Gulf. Not peacefully—she fought it, the way exhausted people do, her body surrendering in stages. Her head drifting toward the window, catching herself, drifting again. Finally giving in.
I didn’t sleep.
I tried. Closed my eyes for maybe ten minutes and saw Tommy’s face and Sarah’s name on a hospital chart I’d never seen and my parents’ car on a highway in the snow. So I stopped trying.
Instead I sat across from her in the darkened cabin and watched the world change below us. The Caribbean giving way to the Gulf Coast, then the great dark sprawl of Texas, then the scattered lights of New Mexico. The terrain rising. The air getting thinner. I couldn’t see it from thirty-five thousand feet, but I could feel it—the shift from sea level to something higher. Something closer to home.
I hadn’t brought anyone to Aspen. Not since the house was built. Mike had been there—Mike had been everywhere—but Mike didn’t count. Shane kept a room but rarely used it. Destry had visited once, for Christmas, and had the good grace to leave after two days when he saw that I needed the solitude more than the company.
The house in Aspen was the one place in my life where I didn’t have to perform. No board meetings, no negotiations, no strategic smiles. Just mountains and silence and the ghost of the person I might have been if Tommy hadn’t died and I hadn’t spent the next decade building an empire to outrun the grief.
And now I was bringing Charlie there. A woman I’d known for mere weeks. A woman whose mentor had died twelve hours ago and who was currently asleep in my jet with her face still raw from crying.
I was bringing her to the only place I’d ever been honest.
Mike would have things to say about this. Mike always had things to say, delivered in that flat ex-military cadence that made even the most devastating observations sound like weather reports. He’d look at me with that expression—the one that said I know exactly what you’re doing even if you don’t—and he’d probably say something like, “So we’re doing this now,” and I’d say, “Doing what?” and he’d just stare at me until I heard myself.
But Mike wasn’t here. Mike was in Roatan holding down the SEAS operation because I’d walked out in the middle of the night with a woman in my arms and he’d taken one look and said go. Because that’s what Mike did. He showed up and he let you go in the same gesture.
The thought should have terrified me. It did terrify me. But not enough to turn the plane around.
Adam’s voice came over the intercom, low and professional: “Beginning descent into Aspen. Ground temp is twenty-eight degrees. Light snow.”
I looked out the window. Below us, the Rockies were emerging from the darkness—jagged and white and ancient, lit by a moon that turned the snow into something luminous. The mountains I’d been dreaming about on the Roatan veranda when I’d said the word home and it had come out raw.
Charlie stirred. Didn’t wake. I reached across and adjusted the blanket that had slipped off her shoulder. She murmured something I couldn’t hear and curled tighter into the seat.
The plane banked into its approach. Snow on the ground. Mountains in every direction. The place I’d kept to myself, or at least, to family only, for ten years.
