Read Falls Like Lightning for Free Online

down in a place she hadn’t been to since her father’s disappearance.
    Elle lifted her insulated mug and sipped English breakfast tea. Herbal dregs mixed with honey. The stretch of cool stratus steel along the horizon lifted, pushed up by a narrow band of molten sunlight.
    The car still smelled like her father. A hint of Brut aftershave, not overpowering or odious. She breathed deep.
    Thinking about it now, she marveled at how he, her dad, finished raising her on his own. Granted, she had already been fourteen when her mom died of cancer. And she’d pretty much grown up at the McCall Smokejumper Base. She’d had free rein, really, about that little part of Idaho, surrounded by forest and Payette Lake. That little section of the state had been the planet to her. It was all she’d known. So much freedom—swimming in Payette by herself and hiking off and wandering to places she’d never consider letting Maddie, even as a grown-up, go alone.
    She loved to fly like her dad, but short of a vague sense that piloting airplanes would somehow fit into her future, she really wasn’t sure of what the days ahead would hold. But one thing she knew for sure by the time she’d turned nineteen—and that summer with Silas Kent confirmed it—she never wanted to marry a smokejumper.
    Strange, now that she thought about it, that a girl raised with so much independence would “settle down” so early. She’d thought she was making the prudent choice in marrying Seth Riordan the winter after Silas left. The decision had felt stable, secure. He offered the chance at a family a bit more as it was “supposed to be”—in a house in a suburb, nowhere near a runway, and void of men who launched themselves out of aircraft for a living.
    Seth had a business degree and a reliable schedule. Promoted to middle manager of sales at an insurance office, he’d left for work at seven thirty, taken his half-hour lunch break at twelve thirty, and was off at four thirty. She never questioned his monthly “sales” trips that took him away for a week at a time. It was part of the job.
    They had a sixteen-hundred-square-foot house with a four-hundred-square-foot lawn in a ten-square-mile linear section of town. Two of their neighbors were retired. The house next door was a rental. She’d had a rainbow sprinkler on a hose in the front yard with patchy wet ground and clumps of crab grass, a JCPenney wedding ring, and a belly newly rounding with their growing child.
    It was all impeccably, comfortably, and numbingly safe.
    Just what Elle wanted.
    Elle drove into the hangar, pulled the key, and set the e-brake. “We’re here, baby.” The space seemed inordinately large for the MG.
    Maddie looked up through the windshield and grinned. “There’s the twin otters.”
    Elle pulled their suitcases from the trunk. “There she is. All ready for us.”
    Wind rattled the corrugated metal walls. Oversized steel-dome light fixtures buzzed, suspended from steel beams that arched overhead.
    Madison shuffled her tennis shoes along the floor, squeaking like a basketball player.
    “Maddie, please don’t.”
    “Sorry.”
    “Here, take your backpack and blanket.”
    “Do I get to ride in the front seat?”
    “Yes. Well, in the cockpit, at least. I’ll strap you into the seat behind mine. You’ll be my navigator.”
    “What’s a navigator?”
    “The girl in charge of where the plane goes.”
    “But that’s your job.”
    “Well, yes. But you can help me with the map so we know just how to fly down to California to pick up the boys.”
    ———
    Elle hung her headset over the hula girl glued atop the instrument panel.
    Silas Kent.
    Unbelievable.
    How many years had it been? Why did she not know he’d been stationed in northern California?
    He still looked more like a surfer than a fireman.
    Streaked raindrops from the afternoon’s thunder cell stained the plane’s narrow windshields. The circle of smokejumpers he stood with on the tarmac joked and