Page 22 of The Unfinished Line

This was where I drew the line.

I stumbled aside, allowing the other eleven people on my scheduled flight to go around me—they were welcome to test their death-defying fortune—and pulled out my phone.

I quickly scrolledAmerican Airlines. United. Delta.

Nothing. Nothing until tomorrow mid-morning.Shit. I’d already told Dillon I was catching a flight this evening. After Hawaii, I couldn’t imagine standing her up again.

But I also couldn’t fathom stepping into a fuselage the size of Dani’s Range Rover.

I looked up the ferry. Four hour trip—okay, not bad. I clickedbook now.

Double shit. Next departure: tomorrow morning.

I considered running back up the steps to the terminal and renting a car, but realized my license was in the backpack I’d willingly handed over during check-in. Something about “space saving.” I should have taken that as a hint.

“Miss?”

I looked up to find a man in a suit peering out the cabin door. The flight attendant. No, God help me, the co-pilot. Theco-pilotwas seating passengers on this Lego-sized rust-rocket.

“Care to join us?”

In what, death?

The windsock on the flagpole was beginning to flutter, the breeze fanning my burning cheeks.

Stone me.

I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me, but my feet started moving against my will, forward, up the rickety six-step ladder, and into the cramped cabin. If part one of this trip hadn’t already proven I’d lost my mind, there was no question now.

I sank into the last seat available and clipped my seatbelt—all the good that strip of nylon was going to do me—forcing myself to try and breathe. It would be okay. I would be okay. Everything would be okay. Thousands of these puddle jumper planes flew safely every single day.

Well, except for the ones that didn’t.

Just ask John Denver. Patsy Cline. Jim Croce. James Horner.

It’s okay. I wasn’t famous. The gravitational pull of the earth only seemed to want the talented elite.

Right?

I looked over the head of the grinning silver-haired grandma sitting next to me, trying to see out the window.

“Exciting, isn’t it?” She had a Midwestern accent. “It’s like stepping back in time with Amelia Earhart.”

Lady, I wanted to say to her,don’t you know they never found her body?

Instead, I closed my eyes and wondered who would be cast as Addison Riley after they dragged my lifeless corpse from the sea.

After the longest thirty-one minutes of my life—which turned out not to be thelastthirty-one minutes of my life, so at least there was that to be grateful for—I bolted out of the aerial sardine can on shaky legs. Subduing the urge to kiss the ground, I shouldered my way through the single glass door to the baggage claim area. Neither of the two carousels had yet to kick to life, so I took the opportunity to call Sophie.

“What the hell am I doing here?”

Sophie’s laugh, always perfectly melodic, sounded on the other end of the line. “I take it you made it to Key West. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t have said. My eyes had been squeezed shut the entire flight, trying to keep down the coffee I’d had on my way to the airport. Now, however, with the concern of imminent death no longer relevant, a whole new anxiety was settling in my stomach.

“She’s going to think I’m a psycho. What if she asks what I’m doing in Miami?”

I could practically hear Sophie’s eye roll from three thousand miles away. “Kam, we’ve gone over this. You’re an actress.”

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