The Color of a Promise (The Color of Heaven Series Book 11) (18 page)

I took a breath and went over the facts.

Meg was thirty-one, which meant she was born the year after Millicent died.

But that wasn’t proof of anything. Lots of people were born that year.

Meg had a fear of flying that she couldn’t explain, and she experienced extreme symptoms of anxiety at a crash site.

But who wouldn’t?
That didn’t mean she died in a plane crash in a previous life. It just meant she was sensitive to tragedy. Most good people were.

But why choose this line of work? I wondered, still tapping my finger on my knee.

I had asked her that once, and she told me she had fought through her fear to get her pilot’s license and had become hooked on aviation. She later said she “lived and breathed” airline investigations. That she was obsessed.

Why the obsession?
Interestingly, that was her word, not mine.

I thought back to the moment when it first occurred to me that she might be Millicent. It had struck me only a few hours earlier, while I was reading the accident report and began to recall my friendship with Millicent in the seventh grade.

It wasn’t anything specific that caused me to make the connection, just a feeling that if Millicent were alive today, she would be just like Meg, because Millicent had also possessed a personal drive that bordered on obsession when it came to anything she wanted to have or do.

School, for instance. Millicent was a high achiever in that area.

The clubhouse. She was unstoppable in our quest to build it.

And Aaron. She had nearly lost her sanity trying to make my brother fall in love with her.

Millicent had a way of attacking things, and Meg struck me as the same. Their personalities were freakishly similar. And whenever I looked into her eyes, I felt like we already knew each other very well. It had been that way from the first moment.

But still—and I told myself over and over—it didn’t mean Meg was Millicent. They could be similar without being the same. And maybe it was just the frustration of lust because she was completely unattainable. She was already in a relationship—a nine-year relationship with a surgeon.

I shook my head at myself. Why couldn’t I learn this lesson: that it was pointless to live in the past, always trying to recapture something that was never meant to be? Like with Katelyn.

What mattered was the here and now, and what lay ahead in
this
life.

So even if I was overwhelmingly attracted to Meg, for whatever reason, I shouldn’t be imagining that she was someone else. She was just Meg—thirty-one-year-old Meg—an unavailable crash investigator I found heart-stoppingly attractive.

Damn
.
Talk about life being unfair.

Chapter Thirty-one

Meg

As soon as I arrived back at the hangar, I called Gary and told him everything Jack had gleaned from the report about the Arizona crash in 1984 and the oxygen supply company that had caused the accident. I asked Gary to share the information with the FBI and also have our team look into what had been loaded into the cargo hold of Flight 555—which my highly skilled team was surely doing already—but to specifically be on the lookout for any connections to Reg Harrison’s company, Oxy-GeoTech.

Hanging up the phone, I returned to the reconstruction area, where we were still cataloguing pieces from the wing and parts of the fuselage. I could feel my body temperature rising with frustration. I felt restless and short-tempered.

I wanted to start putting this aircraft back together now, to see exactly what kind explosion we were dealing with, but everything was spread out all over the floor, and we still didn’t have the tail or any major portions of the rear fuselage, not to mention the flight data recorder. I couldn’t help but feel annoyed by all the holdups. I was consumed by impatience, because there was something about this crash that was eating away at me, more so than other crashes I’d worked on. I wanted to be at the finish line, at the point where we had concrete answers and were ready to publish a report. But I knew I couldn’t rush it. I had to be thorough.

As I stood looking around at the unsolved puzzle—at all the tiny, battered, and torn-up pieces of metal spread out on the floor—I felt weariness at a bone-deep level.

I wanted this finished so that I could move on.

But move on to what, exactly? Another crash?

The thought of that caused my mood to take a dark turn, even though it was already in a gloomy, agitated place.

Would there ever come a day when there would be no more plane crashes? No more frightening, untimely deaths and paralyzing grief for those left behind?

Every day, that’s all I wanted. That’s what drove me—the inescapable need to prevent the next disaster from happening.

But was it even possible in this world we lived in? Or would I live out the rest of my days with this frustration, always feeling a sense of failure whenever another plane went down and I had to pack up and travel to another morbid crash site and start all over again?

Knowing that assurances of total safety would never be possible in the world of aviation, I dove into my work that night as I always did, with ferocious concentration and focus, wanting to tackle this investigation and find the answers the families so desperately needed.

After about three hours of inspection and cataloguing—and answering dozens of questions about the tiniest details from different workers—my cell phone rang.

When I checked the call display, my stomach turned over with dread.

o0o

“
Hey
…” I said in that quiet, intimate voice Malcolm would expect when I answered his call. “How are you doing?”

I walked through the giant open door of the hangar to stand outside on the tarmac, where I could watch planes in the distance, taxiing to and from the runway. A nearby truck sounded its back-up alarm as its reverse lights came on.

It was completely dark now and the sky was clear with a half moon.

“I’m doing okay,” Malcolm replied. “I just got home a little while ago and I’m about to dig into a giant container of Pad Thai.”

“That sounds yummy.” I looked down at the worn hem of my trousers and my black leather shoes as I paced in small circles in front of the hangar.

Suddenly, I found myself trying to remember the last time I wore a skirt or a sundress. Or flip flops? God, it was the middle of summer. When had I last painted my toenails?

More importantly, why didn’t I have a normal life, like most people?

“How was work today?” I asked Malcolm.

“Oh, you know. Same old, same old. Did a couple of knee replacements and put a pin in a guy’s elbow. How about you?”

I breathed deeply and looked up at the sky, then turned my gaze toward a tiny, distant light—a plane on its final approach, still many miles away.

“Do you ever think about what it would be like to die in a plane crash?” I asked Malcolm. “Do you wonder what you would be thinking when the plane was going down, in those last few seconds?”

“Jeez… What kind of question is that?”

I cupped my forehead in my hand and shook my head. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. It’s been a stressful day. I must be losing it.”

Malcolm was quiet for a moment, then surprisingly he answered the question. “I’d probably freak out about who was going to cover my shift the next day. I’d be fumbling with my phone, trying to make a quick call to let them know I wouldn’t be in.”

I stopped in my tracks and felt a sudden rush of anger—first of all, that he would actually think
that
in his final moments. Second of all, that he was making fun of this. “Seriously?”

He scoffed. “No, Meg, I’m joking.”

But I wasn’t sure I believed him. He probably
would
think about his job, and not about me.

Another plane took off noisily.

“You must be at the airport?” Malcolm said.

“Yeah, we’ve set up shop in the hangar.” I began to pace again, and looked down at the toes of my shoes as I put one foot in front of the other.

Left, right, left, right…

It’s time for us to break up.

How odd that I felt no regret or sadness over the fact that I had finally come to the conclusion that this relationship wasn’t worth fighting for. It hadn’t been working for many years, and maybe Malcolm knew it too. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t worried about hurting him.

Or maybe I was numb inside. Clinically detached, emotionally. Incapable of feeling my own personal pain because I was constantly surrounded by the pain of others and I’d had to protect myself.

“Do you miss me?” I asked Malcolm, just to see what he would say.

He laughed awkwardly. “Of course. Why would you ask that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. You never tell me that you miss me.”

“You never tell me either,” he replied.

I couldn’t be upset with him over that response, because it was completely true.

And I
wasn’t
upset. Not in the least. That was the problem. I felt only indifferent about Malcolm’s lack of desire to hold me in his arms, to kiss me, or tell me that he loved me.

At the same time, I had to question
why
I was having these thoughts today, when there were so many other things on my mind, crash-related.

But of course, I knew the answer. This was Jack’s fault. Just because I knew how to detach emotionally when it counted, didn’t mean I couldn’t recognize what was causing this disruption in me. I felt passion and excitement for the first time in years—I felt
alive
—and suddenly it seemed like such a waste, not to feel this kind of passion with the boyfriend I was spending my life with.

Life was short and oh, so fragile. I was squandering it. So was he.

And really…
boyfriend
? What a childish word to describe our relationship when we were both in our early thirties and had been together for nine years.

“Can I ask you something else?” I said, tilting my head back to look up at the stars again.

“Sure.” I heard the microwave door open and close as Malcolm withdrew his Pad Thai. I imagined him carrying it to the kitchen table with oven mitts, getting ready to tell me that he’d talk to me tomorrow, so that he could eat his supper while it was still hot.

“Why don’t we ever talk about marriage?” I asked. “Is it not something you want?”

Malcolm was silent for a few seconds. “Is it something
you
want? I didn’t think so. You’ve always said you were married to your job.”

I let out a heavy sigh, because I had indeed said that, once. And it wasn’t as if my womb was suddenly aching for a baby tomorrow, or that I wanted to move to the suburbs and get a house with a white picket fence, and become a happy housewife and soccer mom.

But if I ever wanted children—eventually—I couldn’t continue to coast along this current path of status quo. There was a biological clock to consider. I was nothing, if not scientific and practical.

“I did say that,” I replied, “but I was younger then.” I wandered around to the side of the hangar where there was a patch of grass overcome by dandelions that had gone to seed.

“What are you saying, Meg? That you want to get married?”

“Do
you
?” I asked, knowing it was a very dangerous question, because what if he said yes? I already knew that a wedding with Malcolm was not what I wanted.

He didn’t, of course, say yes—which was why I’d felt safe asking. I knew.

“I can’t imagine how we’d make
that
work,” he replied with a hint of humor, obviously trying to steer this conversation away from where it was heading. “You’re always on the road, Meg, and I’m always in the OR. One of us would have to give up something, and we both love our jobs.”

Love?

No, I didn’t love my job. It made me throw up. But for some reason, I was compelled to keep doing it. Every day, I had to force myself to be strong, to find a way to get through it.

I almost said “Maybe I
want
to give this up” but I held my tongue, because I didn’t want Malcolm to think I was pushing for him to propose to me, because that wasn’t what I wanted from this conversation.

“You’re right,” I calmly said. “It’s true. We care more about our jobs than we do about each other.”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it
that
way,” he replied.

I closed my eyes and breathed the cool night air. “I would. But it’s okay, Malcolm. I’m not mad about it.”

He was silent. In shock, probably.

“What are you trying to say?” he finally asked.

I began to stroll back around to the front of the hangar, where people were coming and going and phones were ringing, even at this late hour. “That I think it’s time we take a long hard look at our relationship and decide if it’s worth continuing.”

I heard the sound of his fork clinking against the plate. “I don’t understand. What’s going on? Everything was fine the last time you were here.”

“Yes, it was,” I agreed. “But I want more than
fine,
Malcolm. I want to feel joy and excitement. I want to have a life outside of my work…maybe take vacations and travel. I want to feel grateful to be alive. Shouldn’t we all feel grateful? Shouldn’t we be in awe?”