Chapter 6 - The Broken Altar
We didn't speak on the two-hour drive back to our home in Sacramento.
Caleb sat in the back seat, staring silently out the window at the passing rows of scorched foothills, clutching a small piece of charred pine bark he had picked up off the tarmac at the camp.
When we walked into our quiet, air-conditioned house on tree-lined J Street, it felt less like a home and more like a museum dedicated to a life that had ended somewhere up on the Placerville ridge.
Ryan dropped his flight bag by the entryway with a heavy thud.
"Natalie," he began, loosening the zipper of his flight suit. "We need to talk about this rationally. When the adrenaline wears off, you're going to realize that my job requires me to make split-second decisions based on risk assessment. If I let emotion dictate my flight deck—"
"Stop," I said, setting my car keys on the entry table with deliberate slowness.
He stopped.
"For ten years," I said, turning to face him in the sterile, white-lit hallway, "I let you hide behind your competence. Whenever we had a disagreement, whenever I questioned your priorities, whenever you spent four hours having dinner with Brooke and deleted your text threads, you told me I was insecure. You told me that machines don't care about feelings."
"Natalie, this has nothing to do with Brooke—"
"It has everything to do with Brooke," I said, my voice dropping an octave, steady and cold. "You didn't calculate weight and fuel up on that mountain, Ryan. You calculated who mattered more to you when the world ended. And when the smoke cleared, you realized that your past with Brooke was more valuable to your ego than your future with us."
Ryan stared at me, his eyes narrowing. "Are you threatening me with a divorce over an emergency evacuation call?"
"I'm not threatening you with anything," I said, walking past him toward the stairs. "I'm stating a diagnosis. And unlike your aviation statistics, this one is terminal."
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I walked up to Caleb’s bedroom, helped him strip off his ash-stained clothes, and ran a warm bath for him. He sat in the water in silence, watching the gray ring of soot swirl down the drain, not asking a single question about where his father was sleeping that night.
Because he already knew the answer.
