Chapter 2

Mari found the gate log at 6:10 Saturday night, ten minutes after the supper ended.

She'd spent the whole meal distracted. Delphine had told her I'd sent word I couldn't come, and Mari had nodded and smiled through the toasts while something in her chest kept pulling loose. Clay had squeezed her hand and told her she looked beautiful. She'd said thank you. She'd eaten almost nothing.

After the guests left, she walked to the security booth by the gate to ask Marcus about the man who'd been turned away.

Marcus was young, new since spring, and nervous around her. He kept looking at the clipboard on the desk.

"Your grandmother handled it," he said. "He didn't have an invitation."

"Did you see one?"

"He had an envelope."

"What was in it?"

"I don't know, Miss Mari. Mrs. Bellrose took it."

Mari asked to see the gate log. Marcus hesitated, then handed it over. She ran her finger down the entries for Saturday. At 5:40 p.m. a name was printed in Marcus's careful block letters: Elias Corrigan. Under "purpose," he'd written "invited guest."

Mari's hands went cold.

She carried the log into the gin office, closed the door, and sat under the green banker's lamp with her phone in her other hand. The letter she'd mailed ten days ago was still saved in her drafts, word for word. She'd written it on Bellrose gin letterhead, in her own handwriting, and signed it with her full name. She'd asked him to bring the fitting so they could talk before the engagement supper.

He'd come. He'd stood at the gate with the only proof that mattered, and her grandmother had turned him away and never told her.

Mari opened a drawer, took out a small silver plane pin, and pinned it to her collar. Her father-Daniel-had given it to her when she was six, a year before the crash. She barely remembered his face. She remembered the pin, and she remembered the way Eli Corrigan used to lift her onto the wing of his truck when he came to the gin for parts. He'd been kind to her. That was the part no one in the family ever wanted to talk about.

She called the Delta Inn. The desk clerk confirmed a guest named Corrigan had checked in that evening. Room 114.

Mari changed out of her engagement dress, pulled on jeans and a denim jacket, and drove twelve miles down Highway 49 with the gate log on the passenger seat.

She knocked on the door of Room 114 at 7:30. When Eli opened it, he looked older than she remembered-leaner, grayer, favoring his right shoulder. He was holding the leather envelope.

"Mari," he said.

"You came." Her voice broke on the second word. "Nobody told me."

"I didn't figure they would."

She looked at the envelope. "Is it in there?"

Eli stepped back so she could come inside. Then he set the envelope on the bed, opened it, and let the brass fitting roll out onto the cheap motel bedspread.

Mari picked it up. The varnish was still dark in the grooves. The serial was unmistakable.

"This is the one I mailed you," she said.

"It's the one that came off your father's plane."

She sat down on the edge of the bed, still holding the fitting, and Eli sat in the chair by the window, leaving space between them.

"Tell me," she said. "All of it. From the beginning."