The Last Flight Read Online Free PDF Page A

whispers, “I’m glad to hear it.”
    * * *
    When Rory finally climbs into bed around eleven, I pretend to be asleep, listening to the sound of his breathing settle and slow, waiting. When the clock reads one, I ease out of bed, eager to get the final piece I need before I leave, swiping Rory’s cell phone from the charger on his nightstand before I slip into the darkened hall. I can’t risk his phone buzzing with a call or text, waking him up.
    Our townhouse reeks of old money. Dark wood, thick rugs plush beneath my bare feet. I’m no stranger to middle-of-the-night wandering. It’s the only time our home feels like mine. I move through the rooms unobserved, and as I take my final late-night stroll, I feel a sense of sadness. Not for the townhouse, which has been nothing more than a luxurious prison, but for myself.
    It’s a complicated grief, not just the loss of my name and identity, but also the life I once hoped I’d have. The death of any dream deserves to be mourned, all its intricate facets touched one last time.
    I pass through the living room with its large windows that look down onto Fifth Avenue, glancing at the door that leads to Danielle’s office, and wonder what she’ll think when I go. If she’ll be blamed somehow, for failing to keep track of me. Or if she’ll feel bad that she didn’t do more to help me when she had the chance.
    I head down the narrow hall that leads to my office, a small room dominated by a heavy mahogany desk and a Turkish rug that probably costs more than what my mother’s Pennsylvania house was worth. I look forward to creating a home with furniture that isn’t worth six figures. I want color on the walls and plants I have to remember to water. I want mismatched plates, and glasses that don’t require a complicated reordering process to replace if they break.
    I glance over my shoulder, as if I expect someone to catch me in my own office in the middle of the night, reading my thoughts, knowing what I’m about to do. I listen hard, the silence a loud rush in my ears, straining to hear the hint of footsteps two floors above me. But the doorway remains empty, and the only sound is the pounding of my heart.
    From my top desk drawer, I pull out the small thumb drive I used before Rory insisted everyone work in shared docs. My gaze catches on a photograph of my mother and my sister, Violet, hanging on the wall. It was taken before I left for college, before I met Rory and changed the trajectory of my life.
    â€œWe’re going on a picnic,” my mother had announced from the doorway of the kitchen one Saturday afternoon. Violet and I had been on the couch, watching TV. Neither of us wanted to go. We were in the middle of a Twilight Zone marathon. But my mother had insisted. “We don’t have too many weekends left before Claire leaves,” she’d said. Violet had glared at me, still angry that I’d chosen to go to Vassar instead of the local state school. “I want to spend the day outside with my girls.”
    Three years later, they were gone.
    I’d been on the phone with my mother less than an hour before it had happened. We’d only chatted briefly, but I can still hear her voice across the line, telling me she couldn’t talk, that she and Violet were headed out the door for pizza and she’d call me when they got home. In the years since it happened, I’ve often wondered if they’d still be alive if I had kept her on the phone longer. Or perhaps, if I hadn’t called at all, they might have been through the intersection and gone by the time that drunk driver flew through it.
    In my dreams, I find myself there with them, the thump-thump of the windshield wipers, the two of them laughing together in the car, my mother singing along with the radio and Violet begging her to stop. And then a sudden screech of tires, the sound of breaking glass, the crush of metal on metal,