So Irene went around back with her kit bag while George came in the front door and played host to these guests he’d invited over. The master bedroom opened out to its own patio, and Irene let herself in through the French doors. George had filled the bedroom and sitting room with flowers, vases and vases of them, roses and fragrant stargazer lilies, her favorites. He was good at gestures like that. Irene bent to sniff a bouquet on her nightstand. There was a note beneath in George’s elegant handwriting. You’re home safe, and that’s all that matters. Love, G.

She thought about that note as she bathed in the giant white porcelain bathtub, taking care not to dislodge the sling provided for her by the doctor in Fort Worth, who had asked for her autograph afterward. That’s all that matters. Was it really? Because she also remembered George’s words on the way to the airfield, the morning of the start of the derby. You’ve got to win this, darling. Not second or third. We need another victory, or the new lecture tour is going to bust. So the state of her health was important, but it wasn’t the only thing that mattered, not by a long shot, at least to George. Flying was expensive. They had to fill those lecture halls next month, and to fill lecture halls you needed the public’s fascination, you needed to be on the cover of twelve different magazines, looking dashing and triumphant, and gorgeous didn’t hurt, either. You needed rapturous column inches and newsreel footage of you roaring down an airfield driveway behind the wheel of a Hudson roadster.

Most of all, though, you needed a photograph in which you waved triumphantly from the cockpit of your silvery Rofrano Sirius, having just beaten the boys to win the 1936 Coast-to-Coast Air Derby.

The bath was heaven, but Irene didn’t deserve heaven. She’d taken a risk when she saw the squall moving in over the Fort Worth sky, and it hadn’t paid off. Now her beautiful airplane was on a train in Arizona somewhere, on its way back to Burbank for repair, which would cost a stack of money she didn’t have, wouldn’t have, unless this next lecture tour was a smashing success. And how was she going to fill fifty-nine lecture halls across America when she wasn’t news anymore, when she hadn’t won an air race in two years, when everybody had already forgotten about her solo flights to Europe and to Hawai’i and Rio de Janeiro, her circumnavigation of the globe?

Well, George would figure something out, wouldn’t he? George always figured something out.