“I’ll take her straight to the lab, see what I can see. So, are you staying in town tonight?”
“We’re going home,” Liam told Brillo.
“Okay. I’ll give you a call when I’ve got something.”
He drove off, and Wy got clearance from the tower. They were back in the air five minutes later.
Liam felt a sense of relief as the lights of the big city receded behind them, and wondered at it. “It’s easier flying at night,” he said over the headset.
She looked at him in the darkness of the cabin. “You’re not as afraid to fly in the dark?”
“I don’t think I am. Or at least not as much as I am during the day.”
“It’s a miracle,” she said lightly.
“Maybe it’s just that I can’t see how far up we are.” He peered out of the window, saw a flare burning on one of the Inlet oil rigs far below, and straightened hastily.
“Or maybe you’re just tired of being scared and your little monkey brain has decided enough is enough.”
“Maybe,” he said, unconvinced. He was glad, though, to be spared some of the usual terror. He wasn’t relaxed enough to doze, but at least he wasn’t holding the aircraft up by the edge of his seat.
It was dark and warm in the cabin. Outside the stars were very bright, competing with the new moon, and both lit every rugged peak and every hanging glacier of the pass in bold relief. The moonlight reflected off the snow and lit the cabin of the aircraft with enough light to read by. He was very conscious of Wy’s shoulder brushing his, of her strong hands, relaxed and competent, resting on the yoke, of her long, jeans-clad legs stretched out in front of her, the soles of her feet just touching the rudder pedals. He turned a little in his seat so he could watch her.
She glanced over. “What?”
“Nothing. I just like watching you work, is all.”
Her teeth flashed in the dim light. “Since when?”
“Since tonight, I guess.”
She held up a hand and turned a knob on the tuner. A woman’s voice gave a recorded weather report. When it began to repeat, she turned it off.
“I love you, Wy.”
She reached for his hand and brought it to her lips. “Same goes.”
He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her palm. They flew on steadily for a few moments, content.
“Liam?”
“What?”
It was odd, but the question she had been dreading to ask came out more easily than she had imagined. Maybe everything was easier at five thousand feet. “Are you going to take that job that John Barton offered you?”
“I don’t know.” His answer, too, was much less tense than it might have been.
“Do you want it?”
Did he? Did he want to go back to the fast track, to being John Dillinger Barton’s fair-haired, handpicked successor, well up on the ladder to the top?
He remembered the answer he’d given Brillo Pad when the ME had wanted to know if they were staying the night in Anchorage.We’re going home. It was natural now, or so it seemed, for him to call Newenham home. He thought of the people he would never have met if not for his fall from grace and his transfer to Newenham. Bill Billington, a magistrate unlike any other he had ever encountered. Moses Alakuyak, that not-quite-dried-up little demon. Charlene Taylor. Newenham had given him Wy back. Newenham had given him Tim.
He thought then of the mighty river flowing past their deck, of the great bay it emptied into, of the rolling muskeg and the hundreds of lakes and the ragged peaks and glaciers and hidden valleys beyond. Of the little herd of caribou that he had been told wandered into town in the early spring when they overran their calving grounds. Of the walrus hauling out in herds on the beaches of an island just miles down the coast. Of the hundred tiny towns and villages, cabins and fish cabins and lodges sprinkled across this vast area with a lavish hand, each one housing some gem of a person like Leonard Nunapitchuk, who refused to be a victim, who remained stubbornly in his own house even after his wife had been murdered in it by the same man who had kidnapped and murdered his daughter.
“You know, Wy, I don’t know the answer to that one, either. Three years ago I wouldn’t have hesitated; I would have grabbed it and ran. I had a wife, and a son, and a career where there was nowhere to go but up. And then I met you. Wy?”
“What?”
“If I take the job, will you come with me? You and Tim?”
There was a brief silence. “I don’t know, Liam. This is honest. I don’t know.”
He laughed then. “Yeah, well, we’re not the most decisive couple on the block, now, are we?”
“I guess not.” She laughed, too, a little. “Liam.”
“What?”
She took his hand, and his curled around hers in a comforting grip. “There is Tim.”
“There certainly is. I wasn’t thinking we’d leave him behind.”
“I know.”
“I like him, Wy. I like him a lot. And without sounding too egotistical, I think he likes me. I’d like to be his father. And,” he added pointedly, “I’d like to make it official.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “Man, I never knew anyone more hot to get married than you.”
He leaned over to kiss her. “ ‘Hot’ doesn’t even come close,” he said with his best sexy growl, and then his mike got tangled up with hers and they both started to laugh.
“Tim can’t get into any more trouble in Anchorage than he has in Newenham,” he said, sitting back. “Same cliques, same drugs, same joysticks. He can go to the malls and the movies, and it’ll be harder to keep tabs on him if he finds a friend with a car, but otherwise it’s not that different.”
“It’s a lot bigger than Newenham. The school’s bound to induce big-time culture shock. And then there is Natalie.”
Liam shook his head. “I never would have thought to hear you using Natalie Gosuk as a reason to keep Tim in Newenham.” He was gentle but inexorable. “Are you sure she isn’t just an excuse to keep you there, too?”
She was silent. They were out of the pass and were losing altitude, on approach across the Nushugak into the Newenham airport.
“Do you know the words in the wedding service, Wy? ‘Forsaking all others, so long as you both shall live.’ That’s what I want. ‘Forsaking all others.’ And all other places. We don’t have to move to Anchorage; that’s not what I’m saying.”
She didn’t sound angry. “It kind of sounds like that, Liam.”
He was exasperated. “Do you get anything about me at all, woman? I love you! I’ve always loved you! I would have walked out on my wife and my child if you’d asked me! But you didn’t ask!”
She stared at him. “Don’t you get anything about me?” she said at last. “I wouldn’t have wanted you if you’d been able to do something like that. One of the reasons I love you, that I’ve always loved you, is that you’re an honorable man. I knew all I had to do was drive to Glenallen and knock on your door. I always knew that.”
“But you didn’t.”
“So I didn’t love you enough to? Is that what this is about? I let you back into my life, Liam, into Tim’s life. You’re important to both of us now.”
“I want to be essential.”
“You are. You were then.” She was silent. “Or…”
“What.”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t know, Liam. Love is supposed to be unselfish. If you love, you’re supposed to want what’s best for the person you love.”
“And?”
“And if I’d loved you enough then, I shouldn’t have asked you to choose between me and Jenny and Charlie. If I’d loved you enough, I should have bought the house next door to yours, so you’d never have to be far away from your son.”
His feeling of comfort vanished. The plane seemed very high in the air and nowhere near as steady beneath his butt as it had been a moment before. “You’re telling me you didn’t love me enough.”