Falling

Chapter Twenty-Two

Jolie was messing about with her laptop the entire flight. She snarled at flight attendants, before following their instructions and pulling it away for the, lesser part, of five minutes. Jolie wasn't good at following instructions.

Owen flicked his eyes towards the lengthy paper she was writing with little interest. He just kept focusing on the lyrics of the song he was listening too, which was hard given it was in Swedish or something.

So he focused on the tones, but then again he was never the greatest musician. That made him think of Sarah and singing along to the radio anytime they drove anywhere together. She'd always belt it out in a voice of honey, while he sounded like screeching tyres, at least in his opinion.

Think of the devil and she will appear. He thought, except he couldn't keep the image of a devil and an angelic scene occurred to him instead.

Sarah was holding Mica's hands as the little girl half walked, half stumbled in the direction of the toilets. He watched them go inside and changed his focus. It was a long flight, it would only double in length if he spent the whole time thinking of the girl in twenty-six B, giving her daughter the window seat.

He thought back to that flight so long ago. Then he focused on the music and when that failed he read Jolie's paper about some kind of demographic shift in response to the blah de blah de blah he really couldn't make himself care too much.

So he got up, deciding he too magically needed the toilet.

"Oh my goodness." He heard a woman say.

"Oh, hi." Sarah replied shyly, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. As Owen got closer he too recognised the woman, he'd be dammed.

"Oh, Mrs, 'you should give your child up for adoption, you will never be able to support it,' how nice to see you again." Owen muttered sarcastically. The woman's eyes widened and with a sick kind of glee, Owen was pleased to see she wasn't as nicely put together as on their last flight together.

"I'm-"

"Oh and we do have to apologise." Owen sarcastically drawled, as Sarah hoisted Mica up onto her hip.

"What?" The woman asked, gob smacked at this turn of events.

"Well, we would have invited you to the birth but we assumed you'd want a front row seat, and they were all taken by crack whores." Owen grinned sweetly and felt a pang of guilt at his language. He decided never to use the term again, and definitely not in front of Mica.

Owen smirked at her and took a step closer to peer at the woman.

"Valedictorian. Current top junior female archer in the country. Survivor. Go back to your ivory tower you close minded idiot." Owen said, staring down the woman. People were starting to stare but for once he didn't loathe being a centre of attention. It didn't matter, this wasn't about him, it was about Sarah and Mica.

"I'm-"

"You're what? You're sorry you made assumptions of the woman I love based on her colour and age. You should get down on your knees and apologise for being a cow. But she's also too humble to demand such things." Sarah eyes were wide for a whole lot of reasons.

The woman rushed past, her face red and Owen turned to Sarah smiling before realising some of the things he had said.

"Sarah-" Turbulence rattled through the plane and almost sent Sarah flying because she wasn't ready for it. Mica began to screech, but Owen caught them and held them tight to stop them falling.

#

Six Months Earlier

Sarah was doing a presentation in English explaining the relevance of red heels rather than glass slippers in the Sylvia Plath poem Cinderella.