Page 40 of The Last Flight

And then they’re gone, leaving my mind spinning, trying to figure out how Charlie Flanagan, Rory, and Maggie Moretti intersect.

When I was young, I used to ride my bike across town and into a small wooded area. I loved the way the sidewalk would just end, picking up the beginning of a dirt trail, rutted and winding through patches of shade and dappled sunlight, riding beneath tall trees that kept my secrets.

But my favorite part was when I’d emerge again, my entire body vibrating after so long on the rough terrain, and what it felt like to glide back onto the asphalt—all the bumps smoothed flat again.

I feel that zip now, after so many days of rough riding. I’ve come out again and can see a path forward.

I return again to the thumb drive, finding a file buried in the M’s, labeled simplyMags. But when I open it, there isn’t much. Rory and Maggie dated pre-internet and pre-email. So there are only about twenty scanned images—photographs, notes on lined paper, cards, a hotel bar napkin. Each one labeled with a meaningless IMG number. Clicking through them, an eerie shiver passes through me, Maggie’s handwriting as personal as a fingerprint, as quiet as a whisper in my ear.

It doesn’t surprise me that Rory kept these images, long after he’d destroyed the hard copies. I know he loved her, in the only way he knew how. Like a road map, they trace the path of their relationship from the bright and shiny passion of new love into something more complicated, and reading them is like listening to an echo of my own marriage, musical notes that are both familiar and hollow at the same time.

Near the bottom of the folder, I open a scanned image showing the blue lines and ragged edges of a page torn from a spiral notebook. It’s dated just a few days before she died.

Rory,

I’ve thought a lot about your suggestion we spend the weekend upstate, to work things out. I don’t think it’s a good idea. I need space to figure out whether I want to keep seeing you. The last fight we had scared me. It was too much, and right now I don’t know if it’s possible to continue as we have been. Please respect my wishes, and I’ll call you soon. No matter what, I will always love you.

Maggie

I read the note again, feeling like a wheel yanked out of alignment, steering me in a new direction as I remember that dinner from so long ago.Maggie wanted us to get away for a quiet weekend. To reconnect and really talk without the distractions of the city.

But Maggie didn’t want a weekend away to reconcile. She wanted to break up. And I know firsthand how Rory reacts when a woman tries to leave him.

It’s a gruesome irony that both Maggie Moretti and I had to die to finally be free from him.

Eva

Berkeley, California

October

Four Months before the Crash

It didn’t take long for Liz to start asking questions. First, it was a comment about a smell in the backyard she couldn’t place, which forced Eva to work at night, after she was certain Liz was asleep.

“Are you sick?” Liz asked her another day, after three consecutive all-nighters, dark circles under her eyes. Eva had tried to deflect the questions as best she could, blaming the neighbors across the alley for the smell and a sinus infection for her haggard face.

In the few weeks she’d been on hiatus, the landscape of Eva’s life had shifted, and she was struggling to navigate back to normal. She began thinking about her life as two parallel tracks, the one she was living, with her late-night lab work and the demands of Dex and Fish taking up her time, and the life she’d had just a couple weeks ago. Dinners with Liz. An uncomplicated window of time that had felt lighter and brighter than she’d ever imagined.

And now, as she wove her way through the crowds dressed in blue and gold, up the hill that led to Memorial Stadium, her mind was fuzzy, her eyes gritty. She waited in line at the gate, her eyes trained on the security guards asking everyone to open their purses and bags for inspection. She pressed her arm against her side, feeling the outline of the package of pills, safely tucked into an inner pocket of her coat.

Eva hadn’t contacted any of her clients to let them know she was back to work. She would make the drugs for Fish, but as far as her clients were concerned, she was still on hiatus and would remain so indefinitely. Her singular goal was to gather as much information about Fish and the way his organization was structured as she could, not make money she didn’t really need.

When she reached the front of the line, she opened her purse and watched the guard’s eyes scan the contents—a wallet, sunglasses, and small voice recorder—and held her breath as she always did, waiting for someone to finally see through her act, to finally see her for what she really was.

But that wasn’t going to happen today.

As she passed through the entrance and into the stadium, the field spread out below her, each end zone painted with a yellowCaliforniaset against a dark blue background, the trademark scriptCalcentered on the fifty-yard line. Eva ignored the people in the seats around her, instead staring across the field as the marching band played and students filled the section next to it, feeling more isolated and alone than she’d felt in years.

As an undergrad, Eva had only been to one game, and the memory of it haunted her every time she returned.Meet me in the north tunnel afterward, Wade had said. She’d been shocked to see the number of people lingering there, waiting for players. Hangers-on, followers, sorority girls flipping their hair and checking their lip gloss. She’d hung back, watching as she always did, from the perimeter. When he came out, his eyes scanned the crowd and landed on her. As if she glowed. He passed through the crowd of people and claimed her, putting his arm around her and leading her away, the smell of his soap mixing with the redwood trees that surrounded the stadium. She knew then that she was lost, that Wade Roberts had chosen her, and she was bound to follow whether she wanted to or not.

She’d first met him in the chemistry lab she was TA’ing. At the beginning, she’d assumed he was just another jock, trying to flirt his way to a better grade. But every time Wade had looked at her, she felt an electric zing pass through her.

Early in the semester, she’d been walking them through some basic chemical reactions when Wade had said, “Why are we doing this? When are we ever going to need to know what substances react with calcium chloride?”

She should have redirected him back to the task. But Eva knew she needed to be someone unexpected if she hoped to hold his attention. “Do you like candy?” she’d asked him. And then she’d shown them all how to make strawberry-flavored crystals, a simple procedure that anyone could find on the internet if they wanted to.

That was how it started. A pin in the map that marked the beginning of a journey she never wanted to take. Wade had begun pressuring her to try making drugs shortly after they started dating. At first, she didn’t want to. But what he was asking was so simple, she figured she’d do it once and get him off her back. Science had always been where she felt the safest—among the laws of physics and chemistry. Unlike life, which could dump you at a group home at the age of two with no warning or second chances, chemistry was predictable, its actions absolute. Wade was the person everyone wanted to be close to, and he wanted to be close to her. And so, when he asked her to do it again, she did. And then again after that.

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