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really did appreciate a pilot showing interest in what she did; so many of them didn’t. The mechanic, male or female, blended into the background for most pilots.
    Mickey and Gordon might not even have known she existed if she’d been a guy; though they were both such hounds that she’d have to be seriously “plain Jane” not to have them notice her being a woman. Bruce was no better. Vanessa was still so overwhelmed at being hired by MHA—to fill the MD500 that Vern had vacated when moving to the Firehawk—that a mechanic was still wholly invisible to her, male or female.
    Mark Henderson treated everyone with equal respect, so equal that Denise felt invisible to him too. Emily and Jeannie certainly knew who took care of their birds, and she’d count both as friends, as much as she ever had friends.
    But Vern saw her.
    Really saw her, which was both uncomfortable and interesting. And both emotional responses were for the same reason: they evoked the question of “Why?”
    She studied him without really looking at him as he held the last panel in place for her to screw back down. If she had an emergency and needed help, Vern was probably the one she’d call without thinking about how she might be imposing. That too was a revelation she wasn’t expecting.
    Everyone’s life was a checklist. Like the inspection list on her Firehawk repair report, like her dad’s tally of what chores were owed or skipped when she was a kid. Everything had been a balance sheet with Jasper. It was how life worked. Though with him, she’d always been on the losing side for reasons she still didn’t understand. Some failure in her attempts to be a woman when she was actually just a mechanic.
    Except Vern didn’t work that way. He simply gave. She’d witnessed it a hundred times. Someone was moving and Vern was the first to volunteer to haul boxes. Someone was down sick? Vern would fill in no matter how nasty or dull the chore.
    Even yesterday’s flight. He’d flown at the back of the returning Firehawks’ formation. She’d bet it wasn’t because he was the newest. It was because he hadn’t thought it was of any importance where he flew. Emily would always take the lead, part of being an ex-Army major, and Jeannie would always take Emily’s wing position. Vern was fine with bringing up the rear.
    A guy with no ego on the line, which ranked most unusual in her experience. Unusual? Totally unheard of.
    She focused on anchoring the last of the screws to finish her inspection on bullet number thirty-four as Betsy’s bell announced breakfast. Its peal heralded the sunrise and flushed the early-bird crows and jays abruptly into the morning sky.
    Vern’s hands remained steady and patient while she finished her work, even though they stood close enough that she could hear his stomach grumble when the vagaries of the morning air wafted the smells of bacon and coffee across the field.
    â€œCoffee,” he moaned quietly like a pitiful child, but he kept the piece of bodywork in place as she drove the last screws home, then double-checked that she hadn’t missed any.
    She finished, signed the bottom of the log on her tablet, then made her dad’s hand sign for “okay to fly” as she did at the end of every repair.
    â€œWhat was that?”
    â€œWhat was what?” No one had ever noticed or asked about that. Vern was noticing everything about her. Jasper sure hadn’t. By the end of their relationship, she’d been near enough invisible. Might have been pretty invisible at the start, now that she thought about it. It was as if even being around Vern was slowly shining a flashlight on quite how pitiful her relationship with Jasper had been. “It’s a hand sign my dad made up.”
    â€œDo it again.”
    She wanted to refuse. It was their private sign, only her and Dad, but she did it again.
    â€œSlower.”
    This