The past [2]

Weeks before his final flight, Liam wrote another letter—this one addressed to Lily.

He never mailed it.

Dear Lily,

I don’t know where to start. Maybe I never did. I failed you. I failed Leo. I should’ve fought harder for both of you. I thought I was protecting you by disappearing when things got ugly. But what’s worse than a man who walks away from a fire? A man who leaves his family inside it.

Leo loved you. You were his hero in ways I could never be. Tell him, if souls still listen, that I think of him every day. That I see his face in the sky, and it reminds me what forgiveness might look like.

I don’t expect you to forgive me. But maybe remember me not as a failure—but as a man who tried. Who loved deeply. And who couldn’t carry the weight of that love without breaking.

—Liam

He folded the letter, sealed it in an envelope, and placed it in Leo’s locker, along with a model plane they had built together—still unpainted, missing a wing.

The week before the crash that would end his life, Esther came by one last time. She’d gotten a new job in Eret and wanted to say goodbye.

“Come with me,” she said, sitting beside him under the rusting hangar roof. “You don’t have to stay here, Liam. This place is killing you slowly.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s the point.”

She looked down at the worn tarmac beneath their feet. “I loved you, you know. Not like… romance. Not even friendship. Just as someone broken loves another broken person because the pieces almost fit.”

Liam turned to her slowly, his voice barely audible. “I’m not fixable, Esther.”

She took his hand anyway.

“Maybe not. But maybe you don’t have to be.”

She left the next day.

Liam didn’t stop her.

The final days passed like fog.

Liam began selling what was left—tools, chairs, aircraft parts. The Cessna he would crash was all he kept, along with the journal and Leo’s photo. His once-pristine hangar became a museum of rot, a sanctuary for shadows and regrets.

On the morning of his death, he took one last walk through the property.

He paused by the training wall where Leo had written in chalk:

“Dad says flying is just trusting the sky not to drop you.”

The words were faded, but still visible.

Liam touched the wall gently.

“I should’ve taught you the sky doesn’t always catch us.”

He climbed into the Cessna, placed the journal on the seat beside him, and started the engine.

It choked at first—like it too didn’t want to go.

But then it roared.

They say when the plane dropped, it did so with eerie grace.

Like it wasn’t an accident, but a decision.

Farmers who saw the descent described it as “silent”—as if the plane itself wept instead of screamed.

There was no explosion. Just a sickening crunch as metal kissed earth.

The wreckage burned only briefly. Long enough for the journal to be destroyed, but not the photograph of Leo. That somehow survived—blackened, but intact. His smile, still visible.

The coroner’s report listed the cause as “probable suicide.” But the aviation authority didn’t open an investigation. No one pressed for answers.

It was easier to let ghosts rest.

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