All right. Marcus said quietly. For them. Not for me. For them.
And Colonel Frank Hollis, 71 years old, squeezed the shoulder of the man he'd once mourned as dead and looked out over the city beside him. And for the first time in nine years, felt like the world had been set right. The time was one year after the flight when Evelyn Carter stood in her office late one evening and realized she had been happier and prouder and more at peace in the past 12 months than in the entire two decades before them. And that she had exactly one person to thank for it. She'd changed.
Everyone said so. She listened now. She walked the floors. She knew her people's names, their kids' names, the concerns they'd been afraid to raise before. The company was safer and stronger and more profitable than it had ever been.
Not despite the new culture, but because of it. Because it turned out that people who aren't afraid to tell the truth build better aircraft than people who are. And through all of it, she and Marcus had built something between them that neither of them had a name for. It wasn't romance. Not yet.
It was something underneath that, something more foundational. It was respect, the deep kind, the kind that's earned an inch at a time over months of watching someone be exactly who they say they are. She had watched Marcus turn down opportunities that would have made him rich because they'd have taken him away from his daughter. She had watched him fight for a young engineer nobody else believed in. She had watched him teach a room full of pilots that being right mattered more than being fast.
And she had watched those pilots become better than they'd ever have been without him. And Marcus had watched Evelyn Carter become someone new. He'd watched the proudest woman in American Aerospace learn to say the words, "I was wrong. " He'd watched her apologize to Delgado, promote Daniel drive across the city to a neighborhood she'd never seen. He'd watched her sit in the back of his training sessions and take notes like a student. He'd watched a person he'd once thought was made of ice turn out to be capable of change so profound it humbled him.
Somewhere in that year without either of them saying it, the mockery that had started everything had quietly transformed into its exact opposite. But neither of them said it. Because some things are too important to rush. And because both of them, in their own way, were waiting for the right moment. They didn't know it yet, but that moment was coming.