CALHOUN’S POV
Airports always smelled the same to me…coffee, steel, and impatience. Expensive impatience. The kind that belonged to men in tailored coats, women on their phones, children tugging at sleeves while their parents pretended not to notice them. I fit right in. I always did.
Yet as I walked through the private terminal, coat draped over my arm, passport already checked, I felt… off. Unsettled. Like I’d left something behind that mattered more than the flight waiting for me.
Maddie.
The thought came uninvited, sharp and unwelcome, and I clenched my jaw as if that could silence it. It didn’t. It never did.
I took a seat near the glass wall overlooking the runway, watching the jet that would take me to California. My jet. Everything was mine—this flight, the schedule, the silen
