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I had gotten those answers within the first thirty days.

During that time, the only nights we’d spent apart was when she was on for her twenty-four-hour shift, which she did twice a week.

If we weren’t at our jobs, we were together.

And then things began to move fast.

There was no reason to slow them down.

She wanted to go to sleep next to me, and I wanted to wake up next to her.

There was only one small bit of turbulence.

Alix hated to fly.

And the size of the five-seater, single engine that I used for personal travel made her anxious as hell.

It took a few weeks of talking to her about it, showing her the aircraft and where she’d be sitting, before she even started to warm up to the idea.

Eventually, we went.

I kept the first trip short. Twenty minutes. Just enough for her to get comfortable with the space, to feel the different shifts of wind and how they moved the plane, to get used to the view while she sat next to me in the cockpit.

It was a lot to take in for someone who didn’t