No, baby. Why would I be sad? Because your face is doing the thing, the thing it does when you're pretending. Marcus sat on the edge of her bed. Eight years old.
She saw right through him. She always had. "I had a hard day," he admitted. "But I'm okay. I promise you I'm okay. " Is somebody being mean to you?
And there it was, the question a father never wants his child to ask because to answer it honestly is to teach her world is cruel and to lie is to teach her that her father is weak. "Sometimes people are mean when they don't understand something," Marcus said carefully. "That's not really about you. That's about them. You remember what I always tell you.
Be brave. Be kind. Come home to me. " "That's right? " He kissed her forehead. "Being kind doesn't mean being weak, Lily. Sometimes being kind when somebody's cruel to you is the strongest thing a person can do.
You hear me? I hear you. Now sleep. He turned off the light and he stood in the doorway one more moment and on the wall behind him hung a photograph of a younger man in an unmarked flight suit and neither of them looked at it. Across the city at that same hour, Evelyn Carter was not sleeping either.
She stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of her penthouse office 31 floors above the lights of the city. A glass of wine untouched in her hand and she was replaying the demonstration in her mind and finding to her own irritation that the moment she kept returning to was not the applause. Not the investors shaking her hand. Not the senator who'd pulled her aside and said the word promising. It was his face.
The janitor's face when she'd said it. "If you can fly this helicopter, I'll marry you. " 600 people had laughed and she'd fed on that laughter and it had felt good in the moment the way cruelty always feels good in the moment. But the man himself hadn't flinched. He'd smiled. He'd lowered his eyes and set down his mop and walked away with more dignity than anyone in that room full of billionaires and it had bothered her all afternoon like a stone in her shoe.
Her phone buzzed. A text from her operations chief. Cortez confirmed for the full flight demo Thursday. Government wants to see the aircraft under load before they commit. High RPM aggressive maneuvers.