“I spent two hours this morning with Rofrano, looking over every inch of her. Not a hair out of place. She’s ready.”

“And you?”

Sam crossed his arms and turned on his side, leaning against the plane. “I’ve been ready for months. You?”

“Course I’m ready.”

“You don’t sound sure about that.”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“Not turning yellow on me, are you?” He said it with a grin, as if to say Of course you’re not yellow, you of all girls. “Anyway, you brought your old dad to see you off.”

“That was an accident. He turned up this morning from some kind of business trip, high as a kite. He’d seen the papers. I couldn’t leave him home.”

“Jehosephat, Irene. You haven’t told your father?”

Now Irene crossed her arms. “I wrote a letter, is what I did. You can say things right in a letter. I figured I’d mail it right before we take off.”

“Irene Foster,” he said, shaking his head, “you’ve got more sand in you than any man I’ve met. You’re going to fly across the entire Pacific Ocean in a metal bird in the sole company of a bum like me, and you don’t care to tell your own father about it?”

“I don’t, no. I didn’t want him anywhere near this place, and especially not those newsmen out front. Now it’s too late, I guess.”

Sam turned his back against the fuselage. Irene stared at his cheekbone, his closed eye, his tense jaw, his matted hair, and asked if he had slept here in the hangar last night. Without moving, he said he had. Nerves, he said. Me too, she told him. So he cracked open one eye and lifted up one corner of his mouth and asked why she hadn’t joined him?

Irene could have answered this question all kinds of ways. Plenty of people already thought that she and Sam were having a love affair, after all. The newspapers hinted it so brazenly that the history books, written in the years to come, would take some form of romantic entanglement between Irene Foster and Sam Mallory as fact. Could you blame them? Put two attractive, red-blooded people, man and woman, adventurers both, together inside a closed cockpit, and naturally some form of chemistry was bound to brew between them. Stood to reason! Anyway, you could just tell, when they were together. That banter, for one thing. The way they looked at each other. And that time she picked a piece of lint from his sleeve? That was the kicker. Everyone in the press room agreed this was something a woman would only do to a man with whom she was intimate.