Finn was five years old now. He was small for his age, with a mop of his mother’s bright blonde hair and his father’s distinctly quiet, watchful demeanor. He rarely spoke, but he was deeply obsessed with aviation. He carried a battered little notebook everywhere he went, its pages completely filled with intricate crayon drawings of helicopters, fighter jets, and fantastical flying machines.
I had actually seen them together a few times. I remembered a night when Liam had brought Finn to the office after hours. Finn had been sitting quietly in the hallway, scribbling in his notebook, when he wandered into the main lobby and gently touched the wooden propeller of a vintage scale model airplane. Marianne had been working late, and she had viciously yelled at the little boy for putting fingerprints on the display.
Liam had immediately dropped his supplies, walked over, and quietly apologized to her. He had taken his son’s small hand and walked away without a single word of defense. I had been standing in the shadows of the corridor, watching the entire humiliating exchange. I had almost spoken up to reprimand Marianne, but the ice in my veins won out. I had simply turned on my heel and walked back into my office.
There was something else I had witnessed, too. Just a few weeks prior, I was working late when I walked past the engineering wing. Liam had been cleaning the simulation room. One of the multimillion-dollar flight training rigs had been malfunctioning for days, its rotor blade feedback mechanism completely jammed. Through the thick glass wall, I watched as Liam set down his mop, opened the highly complex maintenance panel, and casually fixed the intricate mechanical issue in under ten minutes. His hands moved over the wires and gears with a fluid, terrifyingly competent precision that no one could ever learn from internet tutorials. I had stared at him for a long moment before shaking his head and dismissing the entire thing as a bizarre stroke of blue-collar luck.
Now, on the freezing rooftop, Liam walked slowly toward us, carrying a yellow plastic bucket and a wet mop. I barely glanced at him, too consumed by the collapse of my empire to care about a janitor emptying the terrace trash cans.
But Liam stopped just a few feet away. He looked directly at the helicopter, then turned his tired eyes to me.
“I can fly it,” he said. His voice was calm, steady, and completely devoid of inflection.
The words hung in the freezing air for a suspended moment.
Then, Marianne laughed. It was not a polite, nervous chuckle. It was a loud, grating, intensely condescending laugh specifically designed to humiliate. Jordan immediately joined in, chuckling nervously and rubbing the back of his neck.
“You?” Marianne sneered, shaking her head in utter disbelief. “Seriously? What, do you think this is some kind of arcade video game?”
Liam did not flinch. He did not defend himself. He simply stood there, his rough hands resting quietly at his sides, waiting.
I turned and looked at him fully for the first time that morning. I took in the cheap, wrinkled fabric of his gray uniform, his relaxed posture, and the profound absence of any macho bravado. I did not believe him. Not for a single, solitary second.
But the desperation clawing at my throat was suffocating. And there was something highly unusual about the way he had spoken—so plainly, so completely stripped of hesitation—that forced me to pause. I stepped closer to him, crossing my arms defensively over my chest, and stared directly into his eyes.
“You are telling me that you can fly a Bell 407 helicopter?” I demanded, my voice sharp enough to cut glass.
Liam nodded once, a slow, deliberate motion. “Yes, ma’am.”
“This is completely insane,” Marianne scoffed from behind me.
I ignored her, studying the lines of Liam’s face. There was absolutely no fear in his expression. There was no hesitation, no deceit. Just an endless, ocean-deep calm. It stirred a fleeting memory of the man in the simulation room, his hands moving with impossible grace over the jammed machinery.
I made a decision right then. A terrifying, incredibly reckless decision. I let a cold, sharp smile touch my lips, and I said the words that would violently alter the trajectory of both our lives.
“Fly this helicopter, and I’ll marry you.”