Page 143

Even Trace gets involved long enough to tell me to listen to them before his attention goes back to the laptop.

So I drink the damn water. I shift around until I’m sitting differently. Tatum starts talking about something completely unrelated, and the others pick it up like they’ve all silently agreed to keep me distracted.

And just like that, I forget for a second that Sumner’s plane still hasn’t sent anything back.

And I keep waiting for my belly to tighten again.

Eventually I realize I’ve been listening to Scout and Tatum argue for a while without thinking about it.

I hold my breath and check in with my body, but nothing happens.

No squeezing pressure. No tightening. No second contraction waiting to ruin what is already a spectacularly shitty night.

Only then do I let myself sink back against the couch a little.

The click of Trace’s trackpad pulls my attention back to his laptop.

For a few minutes there, my body gave me something new to panic about. Now that it seems to have settled down, I’m right back where I started, watching Trace reload a feed that still has no new updates.

I reach for my phone out of habit, and the second the screen lights up, I realize there’s no point. I can’t call Sumner. I can’t text him and ask what the hell is happening. Even if I sent something, he’s a little busy flying an airplane through a hurricane at the moment.

Or drowning.

No. Nope. We’re not going there.

So I turn the phone face down on the couch beside me.

I don’t want to hear that Sumner knows what he’s doing. I know he does.

I don’t want to hear that he told me he’d come back. I know he meant it.

And I really don’t want anyone promising me he’s okay when none of us has a fucking clue whether that’s true.

I just don’t want to sit here waiting when there’s nothing I can do.

And somehow, without me having to say that either, they get it.

Andie stays pressed against my side on the couch. Scout settles closer against my leg from the floor, while Tatum shifts until she’s sitting near enough that her knee bumps my foot. Ellie abandons the armchair altogether and comes over to perch on the arm beside me.

Nobody tells me to calm down or tries to talk me out of being scared. They just close ranks around me.

I stare at Trace’s laptop screen until everything starts to blur. “How long has it been now?”

Trace glances toward the time attached to the last observation, and his lips press into a thin line before he answers.

“Long enough that they’ll be noticing the gap at operations too.”

Scout looks up at him. “Does that mean they lost contact with the plane?”

“Not necessarily.” Trace turns toward us, and I’m grateful that he doesn’t rush to make it sound better than it is even if I also hate it. “This feed is only one way data comes off the aircraft. Losing it doesn’t automatically mean they lost every way to talk to the crew.”

Andie looks over at Trace. “So what do we do?”

Trace drags his thumb across the trackpad and reloads the feed again, even though we all already know what it’s going to show. “We wait.”

I groan and let my head fall back against the couch. “I fucking hate waiting.”

“We know, babe,” Andie says, and I hate the sympathy in her eyes.