Chapter 8 - THE PHONE CALL HOME
An hour later, we were sitting in the spacious, sunlit kitchen of my sister's house in the Orlando suburbs. The ceiling fan spun lazily overhead, throwing soft shadows across the terra-cotta floor tiles. Leo was fast asleep in a portable bassinet in the guest bedroom, and Maya was crashed out on the living room sofa, fast asleep with her silver wings still pinned to her shirt.
I sat at the kitchen counter with a hot mug of tea, my phone pressed to my ear as it rang three times before David answered.
"Evelyn?" his voice came through the line, raspy and exhausted from a twelve-hour shift on the construction site in Texas. "Hey, babe! I just finished up at the site. Did you guys land safely in Florida? How was the flight with Leo?"
I closed my eyes, taking a deep, shaky breath as the events of the day finally settled over my shoulders like a heavy blanket.
"David," I said quietly. "We landed fine. But we didn't take the normal flight."
"What do you mean?" he asked, his tone instantly shifting from tired to alert. "Is everything okay? Is Leo sick? Did something happen to Maya?"
"Leo is fine. Maya is incredible," I said, letting out a small, breathless laugh that was half relief and half tears. "David... Maya stopped a corporate espionage plot at thirty thousand feet."
There was a long silence on the line. I could hear the distant sound of wind blowing through his truck window in Texas.
"Evelyn... what are you talking about?"
I spent the next twenty minutes telling him every single detail—from the moment Veronica Vance refused to move from seat 11A, to the flight attendant dismissing my boarding pass, to Maya standing up in the aisle with her notepad, to the emergency diversion in Milwaukee and the federal agents waiting on the tarmac.
By the time I finished, David was dead silent.
"David?" I called out softly into the phone. "Are you still there?"
"I'm here," his voice came back, thick with emotion and a rage that matched my own from four hours earlier. "I'm packing my bags right now. I'm taking the first flight out of Houston tomorrow morning."
"David, your project—"
May you like
"To hell with the project, Evelyn," David snapped, his voice cracking. "My wife was humiliated by a stranger, my newborn son was taken on an emergency landing, and my ten-year-old daughter had to protect my family because the airline failed to do its job. I'm coming to Florida tonight."
I held the phone close to my ear, feeling a profound sense of comfort wash over me. "Okay," I whispered. "We'll be waiting for you."
