“Hey, baby girl. Daddy’s on the plane now. I’ll be home in two days. Be good for Grandma. I love you bigger than the sky.”
She always laughed at that phrase—bigger than the sky. It had begun when she was four, when she asked how much he loved her and he pointed up at the endless blue above them and said those exact words.
Now it belonged only to them. A private language. A way of expressing everything that mattered.
He had been thinking about her face as he drifted off to sleep somewhere over Newfoundland. Now, with the captain’s urgent announcement still echoing through the cabin, his thoughts returned to her again.
She was the reason he had left the United States Air Force eight years earlier. She was the reason he had walked away from everything he loved about flying.
It had not been an easy choice.
He had loved flying more than anything else in his life—except her.
The F-16 Fighting Falcon had been his sanctuary. The cramped cockpit his confessional. The endless sky his only true faith. He had logged more than fifteen hundred hours in combat aircraft. He had flown dangerous missions over Iraq and Afghanistan. He had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for a night extraction mission that still haunted his dreams.
Then Sarah died.
A car crash on an icy highway in December. Abrupt. Final.
The phone call came at three in the morning. By sunrise, everything he knew had fallen apart. Overnight, he became a single father to a three-year-old who kept asking when Mommy was coming home—and a military officer whose career demanded months away from her.
