“Do you like it?”

“Yes!” I said. Not my style, but who cared?

“Are you surprised?”

Yes and no. I nodded. “Yes.”

“Are you glad you came flying with me?”

“Very,” I said. And that answer really was one hundred percent true.

For a little while longer, at least.

*

WE NEVER FOUND the letters in the sand. But it was okay. We didn’t need them.

It was about twenty minutes back to the airfield, and we filled those minutes by arguing adorably about the wedding.

We agreed we should have the ceremony on that very beach, and then started listing bridesmaids and groomsmen. Most people were shoo-ins, like his brother, and his buddies Woody, Statler, Murphy, and Harris from undergrad—but then, of course, the question of what to do about my sister, Kitty, came up and stumped us for a while.

I hadn’t seen or talked to Kitty in three years. Her choice.

“You have to invite her, though,” Chip said.

But I wasn’t sure I wanted to. When she first went away, she announced she was “taking a breather” from our family. She’d be in touch, she said. Then she never was.

We knew she wasn’t dead. Our dad had kept in occasional contact, and he could verify that she was living in New York, alive and well—just unwilling, for some reason she would not share, to come home. Even for a visit.

At first it had been a little heartbreaking, losing her like that—being rejected by her like that. But by now, after all this time, I just felt cold. She didn’t like me? Fine. I wouldn’t like her, either. She wanted to pretend like her family didn’t exist? No problem. We could pretend the same thing right back.

Chip thought we needed to invite her to the wedding, at least. If not make her the maid of honor. But I disagreed.

“First of all,” I said, “she won’t even come. And second, if she does, she’ll ruin the whole thing.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“Just her being there will ruin things for me. Just feeling weird about seeing her again will suck the joy right out of the day. Instead of looking forward to the most joyful day of my life, I’ll dread it. Because of her.”

“Maybe you could see each other beforehand and get the weirdness out of the way,” Chip said.

I was in no mood for reasonable suggestions. “Even,” I went on, “if I manage to get past the weirdness, having her there would still mean having her there. Which means a ninety percent chance of her getting drunk and climbing into the punch bowl. Or getting drunk and biting a groomsman. Or getting drunk and grabbing the microphone for an Ethel Merman impersonation.”

Chip nodded. I wasn’t hypothesizing. Kitty had actually done each of these things in the past. He shrugged. “But she’s your only sister.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“It would seem weird for her not to be there.”

I went on. “And it’s not my fault we’re not close anymore, either.”

“No argument there.”

“She created that situation.”

“I agree.”

“And now she gets to spoil the only wedding day I’ll ever have.”

My luck. I’d throw the most exquisite wedding in the history of time, and the only takeaway would be my drunk, black-sheep sister trying to ride the ice sculpture.

If she deigned to come.

Actually, that summed up our dynamic exactly. I was always trying to get things exactly right, and she was always hell-bent on getting them spectacularly wrong.

*

UP AHEAD, THE airfield came into sight.

Chip was especially good at landings, he mentioned then. He just had a knack for them, kind of the way he had a knack for parallel parking.

That said, the sky up ahead was quite different from the sky we’d seen on the flight down. Darker, stormier. “That’s unexpected,” Chip said, taking it in.

“Was it supposed to rain?”

“Not last I checked.”

“You can fly in the rain, though, right?”

“Not really. You avoid it. Or wait for it to pass.”

“I’m fine with either,” I said. So agreeable with that ring on.

“The thing is, though,” he said then, “we’re going to need to land sooner rather than later.”

“So we don’t miss our fancy dinner reservation?”

“So we don’t run out of fuel.”

I studied the horizon. The sky behind us was bright blue, but up ahead it was grayer and grayer. And a little purple. With a smidge of charcoal black.

“That’s definitely rain—but way past the airport. Right?”

He nodded. “Right.”

Off on the horizon, there was a flash of lightning.

Maybe the storm was affecting our air. The ride back had become quite a bit bumpier, and soon I was motion-sick.

As we approached, Chip called in our coordinates in that official pilot’s voice, which was a little deeper than his regular one, and then he maneuvered us into the flight pattern for landing. We pulled around to the left, then turned to run along the length of the runway, then U-turned to descend to the ground. Chip was all concentration. I felt, more than saw, the ground getting closer. A welcome idea.

And then a funny thing happened. As we were nearing the runway, the wings did a thing I can only describe as a waggle—dipping sideways a little and then popping back up—that gave me a physical sting of fear in my chest.

It was over in a second, but that second changed everything. Something was wrong.

I looked over at Chip. His face was stone still.

“Chip?” I said.

“The wind’s shifted,” he said.

“What?” I asked. “Is that bad?”

“It’s a crosswind now” was all he answered.

A crosswind? What was a crosswind? It didn’t sound good. Chip was checking dials, and working the pedals with his feet. His face was expressionless.

He seemed to be holding us fairly steady. I kept quiet, concentrating on willing us some good luck.

We were maybe twenty feet above the runway now, coming in straight. And then, suddenly, the tarmac just slid off to the side. It was below us, and then it shifted away, like someone had tried to do a tablecloth trick—and failed—putting a grove of trees in front of us instead.

“Shit!” Chip said, and he hunched closer to the yoke.

He maneuvered us back into position, lined up over the runway again.

“Chip?”

But he was talking to the radio tower. “Cessna Three Two Six Tango Delta Charlie. Failed approach, strong crosswind.” Then his pilot-speak seemed to fail him, and he fell back into plain English. “Pulling up to try the approach again.”

A blast of static on the headphones. “Roger that, Cessna Three Two Six Tango Delta Charlie, proceed on course.”

And then the earth dropped away from us again. The engine sounded suddenly extra loud, like a lawn mower on steroids. We rose up in the air and repositioned to start the descent pattern over. To the south, blue skies. To the north, purple. Another flash of lightning.

“Is the crosswind because of the storm?” I asked.

Chip didn’t answer. A bead of sweat ran down behind his ear and soaked into his T-shirt collar.

For the second try, he started farther down the runway, as if giving himself room to course-correct if he needed to. Which he did. Twice the runway beneath us rotated out to the side, and twice Chip manhandled the plane into lining up over it again.

“Nice!” I said, wanting to encourage him, hoping like hell he didn’t pull up again and make us start all over. It was the least of my worries at this point, I guess, but I was right on the edge of throwing up.

I wanted nothing more than to touch down on that concrete.

It felt like the longest descent in the history of flight. Chip made one more course correction, and then we were lowering closer, and closer. I could see the concrete of the runway welcoming us down. I willed us to touch.

Then we came to a section of the runway with an airplane hangar right beside it. The size and width of that hangar seemed to provide a little windbreak. We were maybe ten feet above the runway as we passed the hangar—so close—and I could feel the wind ease off as we moved into its shadow. Everything seemed calmer somehow. Even the engine sounded quieter. Chip eased off his struggle with the controls. The ground was so close.

We made it, I thought.