He was right here.
He was falling with her.
Nina fell through the sky with her dead husband beside her and felt, for one perfect moment, the full weight of being loved by him again and how that would never stop, no matter where he was right now.
Nina floated.
The roar became a whisper. The canopy opened above her. The Lowcountry showed all of its beauty, the rivers, the marshes, the islands, the whole beautiful but heartbreaking world that David had loved.
Nina was choosing that now. She was choosing to love it all in his place.
She could see Beaufort. She could see the bridges and the coast curving south toward Edisto.
And she thought to herself, I am still here.
I am still here, and that is enough.
She floated down, and the ground rose to meet her, slowly, gently, getting closer. As the trees grew taller and the airfield appeared below like an outstretched hand ready to catch her, she landed.
Mark unclipped her and stepped back as her legs buckled and she sat down on the grass. She pressed her hand to the napkin again and looked at the sky that she had just fallen through and wept.
These tears were not from grief. They weren’t even the same tears from Señora Morales’s kitchen.
These were grateful tears, the tears of a woman who had been dead inside for two years and was now fully alive again, sitting on the ground in her neon green jumpsuit on a Tuesday morning in September.
The sky above her was the same blue it had been when David was alive. And it would be the same blue tomorrow. It would be the same blue forever.
And she was going to be here to see it for as long as she could.
These three women in neon jumpsuits found each other on the field.
They walked across the stretch of grass, still wet with the morning dew, as the yellow plane circled above for the next group of people who had decided to do something insane before lunch.
Claire was crying and laughing at the same time. She’d been doing that since they landed.
Harper was shaking. There was a slight tremor in her hands and jaw, the aftershock of adrenaline working its way through a body that had just been completely out of control for the first time in almost fifty years.
Nina was just sitting on the grass, tear-streaked, makeup running down her face, clutching the napkin in her hand.
They collided with each other, not a hug, but a collision. They came together in a desperate force of people who had just done something extraordinary.
Claire’s arms around Nina, Nina’s arms around Harper, Harper’s arms around both of them, because she was the tallest one with the longest reach.
They held on with a fierceness that would have surprised the women they had been a year ago.
They stood in a knot in the airfield holding each other, and nobody spoke.
Words hadn’t even been invented yet for what they had just done. Not just today, but over the last twelve months.
Claire pulled back first and looked at them. Her mascara was ruined. Her hair was wrecked. She had grass on her jumpsuit and tears rolling down her face.
“We did it,” Claire said.
“We did it,” Nina said.
“We jumped out of an airplane,” Harper said, as if trying to verify a fact that her brain hadn’t truly accepted yet.
“Twelve months,” Claire said. “We did it. Twelve whole adventures.”
