“And you’re completely sure about that?” my dad asks, his voice crackling through the phone. Surprise surprise, McBride Mills, Middle of Nowhere, Canada, has bad cell reception.

“Yeah, Dad, I’m sure,” I say, staring out the hospital window, onto the parking lot. It’s not even a big parking lot. It’s not a big hospital.

In the distance is the angular, faded metal of mining equipment, then more mountains. God, I’m sick of mountains right now, but at least I’m looking at them through a window.

“You know that Flint Holdings does a very thorough monthly inspection of our entire fleet,” he says. “For one of our aircraft to suddenly malfunction like that would be very unusu—”

“Do you not believe me?” I ask, my voice blunt and hard.

There’s a long pause on the other end of the line, and I clench my jaw.

“Of course I believe you,” he finally says.

“I didn’t crash-land a plane in the Canadian Rockies for fun.”

“Son, I’m not suggesting—”

“Walking through the snow for five days and barely making it out before winding up in the hospital for hypothermia wasn’t fun,” I point out.

I’m staring at the parking lot but I’m seeing my father’s face. In a suit, impeccable, as always. Watch on one wrist, and I’m probably on speakerphone while he’s driving his BMW to some lunch meeting because God forbid the man take thirty minutes to do nothing but have a conversation with his older son.

“Of course not,” he says.

“Then start looking at your planes,” I say. “Start looking at who you’re hiring and what their problems are, because the plane got fucked up.”

He clears his throat. Unperturbed, as always. I wonder what it would take to perturb the man.

“Most plane crashes are caused by pilot error,” he says. “And the insurance company is going to grill you five times harder than I am right now, son, so you had better be prepared to explain what exactly happened before they decide you fell asleep while flying.”

Suddenly, I remember something else.

“The beacon was missing,” I say.

Another long pause. The man is all long pauses, I swear.

“The emergency beacon?”

No, all the other types of beacons that you’d find on a small plane, I think savagely. I don’t say it out loud.

“Yeah. It wasn’t there.”

“You checked the—”

“I promise you I checked every single goddamn place on that plane for it,” I say through clenched teeth.

Another long pause. I know my father doesn’t appreciate being cursed at, but that’s not exactly my biggest concern right now.

“I see,” he finally says.

Now it’s my turn to say nothing. I can practically hear the wheels turning in his head, because plane crash is one thing, emergency beacon missing is another entirely. The crash could be my fault, but not the beacon.

“I’ll have it looked into,” he says carefully. “I’m glad you’re all right, son.”

That, at least, sounds true. He may not believe me about anything else — he may think I was drunk and high and too irresponsible to be flying — but at least he really is glad that I’m all right.

“Thanks, Dad,” I say, and hang up the phone.

My mom is in and out all day, driving the nursing staff absolutely bonkers by doing stuff like complaining about the croissants in the cafeteria or the way that one of the fluorescent lights in the women’s bathroom down the hall blinks too many times when she turns it on.

When she’s not there — when she goes back to her hotel room for a bit to have a nap, or when she goes for coffee or something, just to get out of the hospital — I head out of my room to go look in on Imogen.

Once she’s asleep, her dad sitting by her bed. He just glares, and since she’s not even awake, I just leave.

Another time I peek in and she’s got a doctor and a nurse in there, both buzzing around her foot, carefully bending her knee, talking to her and her parents with very serious expressions on their faces. Bending her knees again, turning her leg very lightly side-to-side, and I figure I may as well let them do their job and show up again later.

Later takes a while, because my mom comes back, and she’s got croissants. Still not up to her standards — surprise — but apparently there’s one “decent-ish” bakery in McBride Mills.

I don’t tell her about the conversation I had earlier that day with my dad. I don’t see the point, because sooner or later it’ll either come out between them or it won’t, and neither way is really my problem.

I think I might be done working for Flint Holdings, Inc. I think I might be done with my father’s company completely. Something went wrong with the plane, I know it, and he won’t admit that maybe Wilder the Disappointment actually knows what he’s talking about sometimes.

“I don’t know why they want to keep you any longer,” my mom is saying. She’s standing at the sink in my room, wiping down the mirror. There’s no reason for her to be doing it, other than the fact that my mom is constantly moving, brimming over right now with nervous energy while I sit in the vinyl chair next to the hospital bed.

The nurses make me get back in the bed every time they want to check me for something. I’m really starting to hate the bed, which isn’t even comfortable for five minutes.

“Well, besides the obvious, which is that you’ve got great insurance because you’re American, and they want to bleed that honeypot dry before sending you back to the states,” she says. “You know, the same thing happened to Nancy years ago when she went skiing up in Banff and ran into a tree. Just a little concussion, but they absolutely insisted on keeping her for two nights for observation or some nonsense instead of just letting the poor woman go home…”

I don’t respond. My mom’s been going on like this for a while now, annoyed at everyone and everything, and the best I can do is just ignore it while wondering when I can get away to visit Imogen again.

She’s probably not supposed to be moving her leg a whole lot yet, but we can work around that. Maybe tonight I’ll even close the door for my visit, so she doesn’t nearly pull my hair out by the roots as she tries not to make too much noise.

“…I mean, honestly, don’t you think you’ll be recuperating better back at home? You can come stay with us for a few days, sleep in your old bedroom…”

Having a cast on shouldn’t keep her from putting her legs over my shoulders, and with the adjustable hospital bed I can still—

There’s a knock on my open door, and my mom and I both turn.

“Wilder!” Amy says brightly.

I forgot about her. I completely forgot that Amy even existed, let alone might be worried about me, but now here she is, wearing her flight attendant uniform and standing in the door of my hospital room with a very large stuffed bear holding a heart.

The heart says GET WELL.

My mom looks at her suspiciously, both eyebrows raised.

“I knew you weren’t dead,” Amy says, ignoring my mom. “A touch of the sixth sense has always run in my family, and I knew you were still alive somewhere out there. I knew it, and I’m right! I told them not to give up on you and that poor girl.”

“No one was considering giving up,” my mom says, speaking up for the first time, and Amy looks over at her like she didn’t realize she was there.

She blinks, like she’s confused. Not that it’s hard to confuse Amy. I wasn’t seeing her for her brains, after all. I wasn’t really seeing her, to be honest, at least not outside her bedroom.

Shit.

“Mom,” I say, standing. “This is Amy.”

“Oh gosh of course you’re Wilder’s mom! I’m so pleased to meet you, Mrs. Flint, though I wish it were in better circumstances if you know what I mean!”

She beams, her white teeth practically fluorescing. My mom takes her hand and shakes it, though she gives me an obvious who is this girl look.

“Wilder and I are—” Amy’s voice drops to a whisper “—dating, even though I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone since we sort of work together and didn’t want anyone to know, but after all this, you know how it is…”

“Isn’t that lovely,” my mom says, her tone perfectly flat and neutral. “And what brings you here?”

Finally, Amy seems to realize that something is slightly off, that maybe she got off on the wrong foot with my mom by suggesting that she was the only one who wanted to find me.

“Well, we’re dating,” she says again, as if my mom didn’t hear her the first time. “And, I, you know, had this feeling about him, and one of the girls switched flights and took my Vancouver to Edmonton route so I could take her Calgary to Prince George route and then one of the air traffic controllers from that airport lives down here, so…”

Amy keeps explaining how she got here to my mom, which isn’t the why that my mom wants to know. I’ve got a feeling that I’m going to get grilled about Amy the minute she leaves, and since Amy’s obviously not someone I was ever going to bring home to Mom and Dad, I’m not looking forward to that conversation.

I wish she weren’t here. I want her gone. I’m human enough to feel kind of bad that she somehow got all the way here, just to see me and give me this fucking ugly bear, but I wish she’d leave so I can tell my mom that she’s just some girl.

And I don’t want Imogen to see her, because the last time the three of us were in the same room I was so desperate to show Imogen that she didn’t mean shit to me that I practically stuck my tongue down Amy’s throat, and… yeah.

Shit’s changed.

“Hey, Mom, could you give Amy and me a minute?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says, the hint of a smirk around her lips, and she leaves the room, closing the door behind her.

“Listen,” I tell Amy.

She’s still holding the bear with the heart on it, her lips in a pretty red pout. I don’t know what the hell she was thinking coming here, but now I have to make our relationship status crystal fucking clear in a hospital in the butthole of nowhere, Canada, and I really really wish she hadn’t bothered to make this journey.

“We’re not dating,” I say bluntly. “We’re fucking, and we’re not even doing that any more as of whenever the last time we fucked was.”

She looks puzzled. Then she frowns, her pretty face slowly scrunching together.

“You used me,” she says.

“You had a pretty good time too,” I counter.

“You used me for sex and now you’re throwing me away. Here. After I came all this way to visit you in the hospital, after I told everyone that you were still alive and they kept looking—”

“I’m sure that was your doing and your doing alone,” I say.

She picks up on the sarcasm just enough for her mouth to flatten into a line.

“I should have known you just wanted an easy lay,” she says, eyes flashing.

I just shrug, because I can’t argue with her. That was precisely the point — she’s hot and I only had to buy her two drinks before getting into her panties.

“You men are all the same,” she accuses. “You only want what’s between our legs, you never care about anything else, about our brains or personalities. I should have never let you sleep with me without at least going on a date first—”

“That wasn’t gonna happen,” I tell her.

She looks unsteady.

“What wasn’t?”

I snort.

“A date, Amy,” I say. “If you weren’t interested I was gonna move on, not try harder.”

Both her hands are white-knuckled on the bear. She’s practically murdering the poor thing.

“And you tell me this here?” she hisses. “Now?”

I just hold my hands out, palms-up, as if to say: yes, I’m obviously telling you here and now.

“You’re an asshole, Wilder Flint,” Amy says, her jaw set hard.

She takes a step backward, toward the door, and relief prickles through me.

“You’re an asshole because the least you could do is wait until we’re back in Solaris because now I’m here and I’ve got nowhere to go, everyone will know I’m humiliated…”

She trails off, like she’s waiting for me to offer some solution.

I don’t.

“I hope you crash your stupid plane again and the next time it’s way worse,” she spits at me.

Amy stomps to the door, her heels clicking against the tile, flings it open, and marches through with her head held high.

I roll my eyes.

Of all the fucking things, I think.