Author's Preface
By Thursday night, Cassian had run out of family members who made sense as killers, and the not-making-sense of it frightened him more than any single suspect ever had.
He sat on his bedroom floor with the laptop open in front of him, the document he'd started three days ago now stretched down the screen in a long, exhausted list, and he made himself do what Zack had told him to do in the café — think like an investigator instead of a frightened kid. Motive. Opportunity. Access. Not feelings. Not fear. Just the cold, mechanical shape of who could actually have done this.
Mum. He crossed her off almost immediately, and hated himself a little for how long it had taken him to get there. She'd been seated beside him the entire flight, close enough that her nails had left marks on his arm in the final seconds — there simply hadn't been a window, physically, for her to have gone anywhere near that cockpit. And her grief, whatever else it was, had never once in fourteen years of watching this woman up close, felt like performance. It was too clumsy for that. Too exhausted. People faking grief did it more smoothly than this.
Bastian. Crossed off too, more painfully, after the garage — a man grieving so plainly, so privately, that Cassian felt sick remembering how coldly he'd catalogued him three days ago. Red numbers on a laptop weren't a murder weapon. Unfinished pride wasn't a motive. And Renner, whoever he turned out to be, had arranged the pilot at arm's length, through a friend of a friend — which put distance between Bastian and whatever was actually coming, distance that felt, the more Cassian sat with it, less like guilt and more like an ordinary man being used by someone closer to the center of this than he realized.
Gran. Crossed off with something closer to relief than certainty — her hands too unsteady for a clean blade, her seat too far from the cockpit, her secret reframed by his mother's story into something sad and human rather than sinister. A woman being found by the son she'd given away wasn't a murder plot. It was just an old wound, reopening at the worst possible time.
Zack. Crossed off almost entirely now, after the café — a man who remembered the crash exactly as Cassian remembered it, who'd wept over a cold coffee cup, who had no plausible reason to kill the fiancé he'd apparently spent three impossible days grieving in advance.
Which left him staring at a list with every name struck through, and no suspect left standing, and a plane leaving in less than eighteen hours.
He sat back against his bed frame and made himself breathe, and made himself think the thing he'd been avoiding thinking since Tuesday, the thing that had been sitting underneath every other theory like a stone under still water.
It has to be a family member. The pilot's throat wasn't opened by a stranger who wandered onto a private jet — it was opened by someone who had access to that cockpit, who nobody on that plane thought twice about being close to the front, who could stand up, walk eight feet, do something unthinkable, and sit back down before anyone had processed what was happening. That's not a stranger's crime. That's a crime committed by someone the whole cabin trusted completely.
But I've ruled out everyone who was actually on that plane.
The thought sat wrong in his chest, snagging against something he couldn't quite name, and he made himself go back through the memory of the crash itself — not the feelings of it, not the terror, but the cold, physical geography of it, the way Zack had taught him to look at it in the café. Who had been seated where. Who had moved. Who hadn't.
Five people boarded that plane, he thought slowly. Me. Mum. Bastian. Gran. Zack. Five, plus the pilot.
He stopped.
Five.
His pulse picked up before his conscious mind had even finished the thought, some deeper part of him already understanding what his mouth was about to say out loud into the empty room.
Five people, and one of them has to have done it, and I've ruled out every single one — which means either I'm wrong about one of my alibis, or I'm missing someone. Someone who should have been on that list from the very beginning and wasn't, because I never thought to put them there at all.
He thought about his father.
He hadn't let himself think about his father much, these three days — every time the thought rose he'd pushed it down, told himself grief wasn't useful right now, that there wasn't time for it, that he needed his father to stay exactly where grief had put him, quiet and settled and finished. But sitting on his bedroom floor at eleven o'clock on the last night before everything, Cassian made himself think about it properly for the first time since October, and something about the shape of the memory refused, suddenly, to sit still.
He had not seen the body.
The thought arrived with a coldness that spread through his whole chest. He tried to remember the funeral — the specific, physical details of it, not the grief-blurred general shape he'd been carrying around for a month — and the harder he looked, the stranger the gaps became. A closed casket. His mother's insistence, gentle but absolute, that Cassian didn't need to see him like that, that it would be better to remember his father as he'd been. An unusually fast burial, arranged within days rather than the weeks these things normally took, which Cassian had assumed at the time was simply his mother wanting it over with quickly, wanting to stop the waiting.
Poison, the police had said. Something in a drink, at home, in their own kitchen, on an evening that had looked exactly like every other evening right up until it hadn't. No struggle. No suspect. A cause of death confirmed, his mother had told him, by the coroner — though Cassian, sitting very still on his bedroom floor now, could not actually remember ever seeing a death certificate, could not remember a single official document with his father's name on it that he had read with his own eyes rather than simply been told about by people he loved and trusted completely.
I never checked. Why would I have checked. He's my dad. You don't investigate your own father's death, you just — you grieve it. You believe what you're told because the alternative is unthinkable.
He opened his laptop with hands that had gone properly unsteady now, and searched, with a dread that felt like swallowing something sharp, for anything official — a news mention, an obituary, a public record — anything that might confirm, independently, outside the closed loop of his own grieving family, that his father had actually, factually died the way he'd been told he'd died.
The obituary existed. Brief, printed in the local paper, exactly the kind of thing a grieving family arranges without much thought for detail. It gave a date. It gave a cause — died suddenly at home — vague in the specific, careful way obituaries often were, the kind of phrasing that could mean anything from a heart attack to exactly what Cassian had been told.
It did not, he realized, staring at the screen, actually say poison. Nowhere in any record he could find, in forty minutes of increasingly frantic searching, did the word poison appear anywhere except in the things his own family had told him, verbally, in the raw, blurred days right after it happened, when he'd been too devastated to ask a single follow-up question.
His hands had gone cold on the keyboard.
What if I was told a story instead of a fact. What if everyone in this house was told the same story, at the same time, by the same person, and none of us ever thought to check it against anything else — because why would you, why would you ever think to fact-check your own father's death.
He thought, with a horror that built in slow, sickening layers, about the timeline his mother had laid out in the study that morning — his grandmother's secret surfacing three months ago, right around the same window Zack had first started searching for her. He thought about the unsigned letter in his grandfather's locked drawer, six lines, unsent, dated two months back — I know what you did, I know what it cost me, I am done waiting for you to find the courage to say it out loud — a letter Cassian had assumed belonged to Zack, addressed in his mind, without ever actually confirming it, to Moira.
What if it hadn't been Zack's letter at all.
What if it had been his father's — a letter written not by a stranger demanding a confession from a mother who'd given him away, but by a son confronting a father over something else entirely, something that had nothing to do with Moira's old secret and everything to do with whatever "unfinished business" Bastian had vaguely, painfully described in the garage.
What if Dad found something. What if Dad confronted Grandad about it two months ago, in a letter he drafted and maybe never sent, or maybe did send, and something about that confrontation is the actual reason two people in this family are dead — and what if the story I was told about how Dad died isn't the true one, because the person telling it had every reason in the world to make sure nobody ever looked past it.
He sat frozen on his bedroom floor, the full, vertiginous shape of the thought finally arriving in one complete, unbearable piece.
What if my father isn't dead at all.
What if he's the fifth person who was always going to be on that plane, and none of us have been looking for him, because none of us have let ourselves imagine that the person we buried a month ago might be the only one of us who was never actually in the ground.
Downstairs, faintly, he heard his mother's footsteps crossing the kitchen, and the small domestic sounds of the kettle going on, the particular late-night ritual of a woman who couldn't sleep either, and Cassian sat very still in the dark of his room with his father's obituary glowing on the screen in front of him, unable to move, unable to call out, unable to do anything at all except stare at six careful, vague words — died suddenly at home — and understand, with a certainty that had nothing left of doubt in it, that the mystery he'd been chasing for three days had just torn itself open into something he had never once let himself consider.
Everyone I've been suspecting is innocent, he thought, the room tilting faintly around him, because I've been looking at the wrong five people entirely.
He closed the laptop. He did not sleep. And somewhere in the house below him, in the last few hours before the sun rose on the final day, someone who was supposed to be dead was, perhaps, already very much awake — and already, perhaps, much closer than Cassian had ever imagined possible.