dollars he was willing to dole out like Halloween candy. Dollars Lee could use to safeguard Sky Dash and ensure her plane stayed in the air.
She would not, absolutely would not, reflect on how or why he made her fingers tingle and her breath quicken.
Rogan tucked the blankets around his son’s shoulders. “Catch you in the morning, Dan-the-Man.” Leaning in, he kissed the boy’s forehead. After coming home from the dock and the bath/cookie/milk/bedtime story ritual completed, it was time for lights out.
“’Night, Daddy.” Yawning, Danny turned to the wall.
Clicking off the bedside lamp, Rogan started for the door.
The sheets swished. “Dad? Are you really gonna fly in that lady’s plane?”
Rogan returned to the bed to sit at his son’s hip. “Yeah, buddy, I am. I don’t like you being with a sitter so long after school.”
What he couldn’t say was he didn’t like the idea of a stranger watching over his child, even though the sitter was a respected woman in the community whose livelihood had been caring for kids after school for almost thirty years. Hell, she came with an arm’s length of glowing reports and references—all of which he’d checked thoroughly.
But Daniel was his remaining child. Rogan had given too many extra hours to his career when Darby and little Sophie still lived. That mistake had been more costly than he could fathom, and one he would never repeat.
“But,” Danny whispered, “aren’t you scared?”
Of flying. Rogan gently squeezed his child’s hand. “Truth?”
A quick nod.
“Sort of,” he admitted. “However, I can’t let it stop me from going to work, son. Or from getting into a plane. Yes, sometimes things are scary, but we can’t let them control what we need to do. Ms. Tait will save me a lot of time with her plane.” And I need to show you that fears can be overcome, that you don’t need to be afraid for the rest of your life.
“Is her plane safe?”
“Yes. It is. She gets it checked regularly.”
Still, Rogan’s stomach clenched. Every day he thanked all the deities for the earache that had kept Danny from boarding that fated flight. But, oh God, why had he not listened to Darby’s intuition? Why had he pushed his wife to make that journey back to the City of Forks for her mother’s sixtieth birthday?
The morning of the flight had been foggy. I don’t feel good about this, Rogan, she’d said, and he’d replied, It’ll be fine. You’ll be there before you know it. I’ll call you at lunch, okay?
But she and Sophie, their eight-year-old daughter, had never made it to Forks. And now he was putting a case together against the airline company.
He stroked his son’s hair. “We’ve talked about this, remember? Dad’s opening his own office here on the island. Then I’ll never have to leave home again, and when I am at the office I’ll be practically around the corner from your school. Flying with Captain Tait is not forever. Just a few days this week, and maybe next. Just until Uncle Johnny and I get things settled at the old office.”
“Why can’t Uncle Johnny move here, too?”
Rogan sighed. “Because he likes the big city.” Although Johnny would never admit it, Rogan believed the fast life was his younger brother’s validation as the family rebel, a label their parents had hung on him at fifteen.
On the pillow, the boy curled a hand under his cheek. “Promise you’ll come back?”
“I promise.”
Silence. Then, “Maybe that’s why Mommy never came back. She didn’t promise.”
“Oh, Danny. No one expects bad things to happen.” It’s always the other guy who’s unlucky.
“You mean if she’d promised she’d be alive now?”
“No, buddy. Promises don’t mean bad things won’t happen.”
“But you just promised.”
“Shove over, okay?” Rogan lay down beside his child and pulled him into a hug. “Promises are sort of like agreements. They mean you’ll do your best to fulfill them. But once in a while things get in the way…and the agreement is broken.”
“Like the mountain got in the way of Mom and Sophie’s plane?”
“Yeah.” Rogan closed his eyes on a flash of pain. “Sort of.”
“Are there mountains between here and Renton?”
Mount Rainier. “Not one we’ll be flying over.”
A quiet fell. “Okay,” came the soft reply.
“You about ready to sleep now, pal?”
“Hmm. ’Night, Dad.”
“’Night, tiger.”
Rogan eased from the mattress. He pulled the door to a five-inch gap and headed for the cabin’s living room. Shrugging into a wool-lined vest, he stepped quietly out the door and onto the tiny front porch. Beyond the trees, the ocean swooshed against the shore with the rhythm of a metronome.
He liked the cabin, liked the secluded woods, away from the old Victorian that was the main house. Here he could think without the interruption of other guests or the owner/hostess, Kat O’Brien, and her son. Not that he didn’t like the single mother. He did; she had given him a respectable two-week deal while he waited for his recently purchased farmhouse to undergo repairs and reconstruction.
Thinking of the ninety-year-old structure a mile from town, Rogan smiled. Farmhouse, indeed. Once, long ago, it had overlooked a sixty-acre sheep farm. Today, the acres totaled fifteen and contained a house and barn in dire need of paint and repairs and a mare with a three-week-old foal.
Taking Danny to see the horses had cinched the deal. One look at that fuzzy-chinned baby gamboling beside its great-bellied mother, and the boy had been a goner.
I wanna live here, Daddy, and pet the baby horse every day.
After a thousand tears and months of heartbreak following the deaths of his wife and daughter, Rogan hadn’t been able to refuse the boy anything. Not even a farm. So he’d bought the place, hired the island handyman Zeb Jantz to do enough repairs to make it livable, and moved from Renton to this B and B cabin in order to settle Dan into the elementary school as well as oversee the renovation.
But on nights like this…nights when his little guy questioned Darby’s crash, Rogan wanted nothing more than to turn back the clock three years to the exact moment he had booked that charter flight to Forks. And the moment he heard Darby’s premonition. He’d cancel the flight and tell her to stay home.
He’d say he loved her one more time.
Scratching his stubbled cheeks, he sat on one of the porch’s two wicker chairs. The spice of sea clung to the night’s breeze and stars glittered like crushed glass in the
