Vivien waved a hand as if the request were beneath her attention and told Dorian to handle the paperwork however he saw fit. Before she left the hangar that first afternoon, she murmured something to Dorian just loud enough for Rowan to catch. A promise that by the time the aircraft was finished, they would find a way to cut his final payment down by half. Dorian chuckled and reminded her that a single father running a boutique repair shop out of a rented hangar had neither the money nor the appetite to fight a company the size of Blackthorne Global Aviation. Neither of them noticed that Rowan had already begun keeping copies of every email, every voicemail, and every photograph documenting the condition of the aircraft the day it arrived.
That instinct proved useful within the first week when Rowan discovered that the damage did not entirely match the insurance report Blackthorne had submitted. A section of the pressurization system showed signs of prior tampering wiring that had clearly been rerouted before the hangar accident that supposedly caused all the harm in the first place. When Rowan raised the discrepancy, Dorian pulled him aside and asked almost casually whether the detail really needed to appear in the official repair log since it might complicate the insurance claim Blackthorne had already filed. Rowan told him plainly that anything affecting the safety history of the aircraft would go in the record whether it was convenient or not and that he would not falsify documentation for any client regardless of how large their name was. Dorian did not push further that day.
But the exchange lodged itself in Rowan's memory the way a hairline crack lodges itself in a wingspar, small and easy to ignore until the day it is not. Over the following months, Rowan led a small, disciplined crew through a rebuild that would have taken most facilities more than a year, working late into the evenings while still finding time for a short phone call to his daughter Avery almost every night. She was 19, away at college, and their calls were rarely about anything dramatic, usually just a quick check on whether she had eaten dinner or finished a paper due the next morning. Rowan had raised her mostly alone since her mother passed away when Avery was still in middle school, a stretch of years he rarely spoke about. But that had shaped nearly every decision he made afterward.
He had walked away from a lucrative engineering career at that time, trading a corner office and a six-figure salary for a small rented hangar and a schedule flexible enough to make every school recital and every parent conference. Avery never remembered a version of her father who chased titles or bonuses. Only a version who came home every night smelling faintly of jet fuel and always asked about her day before mentioning anything about his own. That steadiness forged in the hardest years of his life was the same quality that now made him immovable in the face of Vivien Blackthorne's pressure. Vivien, meanwhile, treated the project less like a repair and more like a personal renovation, sending a steady stream of new requests through Dorian's office.