Author's Preface
Zack's phone search led nowhere fast enough, and by the time the café's afternoon light had gone thin and amber through the windows, they'd agreed on the only plan that made sense left with barely a day on the clock: go straight to Bastian. Not with accusations. With the plain, exhausted honesty that three days of secrets had finally worn Cassian down to.
He found his uncle that evening not in the study, not hunched over red numbers on a laptop, but in the garage — the one room in the house nobody had touched since October, because it was where his grandfather's old tools still hung on their pegboard exactly as he'd left them, and where, Cassian realized standing in the doorway, his uncle had apparently been sitting alone in the dark for some time, on an overturned crate, holding something small in his hands.
"Uncle Bastian?"
Bastian looked up, and in the weak light spilling in from the kitchen window, Cassian saw that his uncle's face was wet. Not the careful, controlled tears from the funerals — something rawer, uglier, the kind of crying a person only does when they're certain no one's watching.
"Sorry," Bastian said thickly, swiping at his face with the back of his hand, an oddly boyish gesture for a man his size. "Didn't mean for you to see that."
"It's okay." Cassian stepped into the garage properly, and only then saw what his uncle was holding — a photograph, worn soft at the corners from handling, of two boys, maybe eight and eleven, grinning gap-toothed on a beach somewhere, one of them unmistakably a young Bastian, the other, Cassian realized with a small ache, his own father. "Is that you and Dad?"
"Cornwall. I think I was nine." Bastian's thumb moved gently over the edge of the photo, careful, the way you touch something you're afraid of damaging further than it's already been damaged by time. "Found it in one of Dad's boxes last week. Couldn't stop looking at it."
Cassian sat down on the cold concrete floor across from him, all the rehearsed, careful accusations he'd walked in with dissolving somewhere in his chest, replaced by something quieter and sadder that he hadn't expected to feel.
"You miss him," he said. Not a question.
"Every single day." Bastian's voice cracked properly now, no performance left in it at all, nothing like the forced cheer of the kitchen two days ago. "He was my little brother, Cass. I used to look out for him. That was — that was the whole job, you know? Older brother. Look out for the little one. And I couldn't do it. Not for him, and not for Dad six days later, and I have gone over every single conversation I ever had with either of them a hundred times trying to work out if there was a version where I saw something, where I asked the right question, where I did something differently and neither of them ends up—" He stopped, pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eyes, breathing through it. "I keep thinking this whole trip, this whole stupid plane — I keep thinking if I can just get everyone somewhere together, somewhere new, maybe it'll feel like we're still a family instead of just — people left over. People who survived. I don't even know if that makes sense."
"It makes sense," Cassian said quietly, and meant it, feeling something in his chest twist with guilt for every cold, clinical note he'd written about this man over the last three days — laughed too fast, unfinished business, red numbers on a laptop — a whole file of suspicion built on a man who had spent this same week grieving alone in a dark garage with a photograph he couldn't put down.
"The money," Bastian said suddenly, not looking up, "in case you're wondering — because I know you saw the spreadsheet, Cass, I'm not stupid, I saw your face when I closed the laptop. Business isn't doing brilliantly. Hasn't been for a while. I didn't want to say anything because your mum's got enough to carry without worrying about me too, and because—" He laughed, short and humorless. "Honestly, because it felt small. Compared to everything else this family's lost this month, a struggling business felt like the least important thing in the world to bring up. Still does."
"The 'unfinished business' with Grandad," Cassian said carefully. "What was that?"
Bastian was quiet for a long moment, turning the old photograph over in his hands.
"He offered to help me. Financially. A few months back, before — before everything. I turned him down. Told him I could manage it myself, told him I didn't need bailing out at forty-one like I was still a teenager asking for pocket money." His voice thinned. "And then he died before I ever got the chance to tell him I was wrong. That I should've just said yes. That's the unfinished business, Cass. Not some secret. Just — pride. Stupid, ordinary pride, and now I don't get to fix it."
Cassian sat with that for a long moment, feeling the last of his three-day suspicion toward his uncle come apart quietly in his chest, replaced by something that ached in an entirely different way. Not every locked door in this family, he was starting to understand, hid a monster behind it. Sometimes it just hid grief, private and unglamorous, the kind people carried alone because they didn't think it was allowed to matter next to bigger losses.
"The pilot," Cassian said gently, because he still needed the answer, even now, even sitting across from a man he no longer believed capable of anything worse than heartbreak. "Malcolm. How did you actually find him? Not the short version — the real one."
Bastian frowned, thinking back. "Through Renner. Guy I've done business with on and off for years — imports, mostly, nothing exciting. He's the one who does the private charter thing occasionally, knows people in that world. I told him I wanted to do something nice for the family, something to get us all in a room together that wasn't a funeral home, and he said he knew a pilot who could sort it fast. Malcolm." He shrugged. "I never actually spoke to Malcolm myself before yesterday, if I'm honest. Renner handled the arranging."
"Renner," Cassian repeated slowly, the name settling into the same cold, careful part of his mind that had been cataloguing threads for three days. "Do you trust him?"
"Never had a reason not to." Bastian looked at him properly now, something sharpening behind the grief in his eyes, some older brotherly instinct waking up despite everything. "Why are you asking me all this, Cass? You've been different this week. Sharper. Scared of something you won't tell me." He reached out, tentative, and put a hand on Cassian's shoulder, heavy and warm and entirely unlike the careless clap of two days ago — this touch had weight to it, the specific weight of a man finally, fully paying attention. "Whatever it is, you can tell me. I know I haven't exactly been — present, this month. I know I've been buried in my own mess. But you're my brother's boy, Cass. If something's wrong, I need you to let me help."
Cassian looked at his uncle — red-eyed, grieving, holding an old photograph like it was the last solid thing left in a world that had come apart beneath him — and felt the full, quiet sadness of the last three days finally catch up with him all at once. Not fear. Just grief, plain and enormous, for a family that had already lost so much and didn't even fully know yet how much more it stood to lose by tomorrow evening, if he and Zack couldn't find the one thread that actually mattered before the clock ran out.
"I will," he said softly. "I promise I will. I just need one more day to be sure first."
Bastian didn't push further, only nodded, and pulled Cassian into a hug that smelled like sawdust and the same cigarettes-nobody-mentioned cologne as always, and for a moment, sitting in the dark garage among his grandfather's untouched tools, Cassian let himself simply be a fourteen-year-old boy who missed his father and his grandfather and wanted, more than anything, for someone bigger and older to tell him it was all going to be okay.
Nobody could promise him that. But for a few minutes, held tightly by an uncle he'd wrongly suspected for three days, it almost felt true anyway.
He left the garage with a single new name written in his notes, small and unremarkable against the weight of everything else he'd catalogued this week.
Renner. Bastian's business contact. Arranged Malcolm without Bastian ever meeting him directly.
It wasn't much. But it was the first thread in three days that hadn't led back into his own family's grief — and as the evening light finally failed outside the garage windows, less than a day now standing between his family and a plane that wasn't going to fly itself into disaster by accident, Cassian understood that it might be the only thread left worth pulling before there was no more time left to pull it.