WITH MOUNTING HORROR, Archie stared out of the open aeroplane doors and three thousand five hundred feet down to the ground below her. As the penultimate static line jumper prepared to take his step out of the back of the plane, terror pinned her to the hard deck of the aircraft.
‘You’re up next, Archie.’ Her instructor’s words were more seen than heard as he yelled over the roar of the engines and the rushing wind.
‘I can’t. I can’t do it,’ she muttered desperately, but the sound was whipped away, unheard. Thankfully.
Throughout her entire life, those had been the only words her beloved air force father had ever flatly refused to hear... I can’t. She glanced down at her colourful ‘Make Cancer Jump’ skydiving suit and felt a hot prickle in her eyes.
Guilt and regret; they had made terrible companions these last five years.
Whatever had happened to the bold, fun-loving, spirited Archana Coates of old? Even of six years ago? Back then she and her father would have jumped out of that door without a second thought. Now here she was, glued to the deck, unable to even inch her way forward.
She didn’t dare look over her shoulder. She was the last of her group of static line jumpers but there was still half a planeload of tandem skydivers all ready to ascend to their required altitude of ten thousand feet. They were just waiting for her to go.
He was waiting for her to go.
Kaspar Athari.
She’d tried to ignore him from the moment she’d spotted him that morning across the vast chasm of the training hangar. Just as she’d ignored the way something had kicked in her chest, and if she hadn’t already known it had died the same day her father had—almost five years ago to the day—she might have been fooled into believing it was her heart.
Kaspar. The boy who had burst into her family’s life when she’d been six and he’d been almost eight, and had turned things upside down in the best way possible. For the seven years he hadn’t just been her brother Robbie’s best friend. He’d also been like a second brother to her, spending every school holiday from their boarding schools—thanks to Kaspar’s money and her own father’s career in the air force—with her family.
Or at least...mostly like a second brother. Even now, even here, she could feel the hot flush creep into her cheeks at the memory of childish crush she’d had on him that last year. She’d been thirteen and it had been the first year she’d been acutely aware that Kaspar wasn’t a brother at all.
The same year his narcissist Hollywood royalty mother had finally tired of her latest husband and dragged herself and her son back to the States in the hope of kick-starting both their careers. But, though having once been one of the most heartbreaker child actors in Hollywood, thanks to a combination of his stunning blonde British mother and his striking, dark-haired Persian father, somewhere along the line Kaspar had turned his back on the industry.
Now he was a top surgeon who risked his life in former war zones and on the battlefield. Saving civilians and soldiers alike. Winning awards and medals at every turn, none of which he appeared to care a jot about. With the press hanging on his every choice.
‘The Surgeon Prince of Persia’, the press had dubbed him, as much for his bone-melting good looks as for his surgical skill.
And even though she’d devoured every last article, had known he split his time between the US and the UK, had seen the Christmas card and US Army antique he’d sent her avid collector father every year without fail, she’d never seen Kaspar again in person. Until now.
Not that he’d even recognised her after all these years.
‘Archie. Are you ready?’
Snapping her gaze back up to her instructor, who was still smiling encouragingly, she shook her head, half-incredulous that, even now, even here, Kaspar Athari had managed to consume her thoughts so easily. Especially when she hadn’t thought of him very much at all over the intervening years.
Yeah, a voice inside her scoffed. Right.
But right now wasn’t the time to go there. This skydive wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about anyone. Just herself. Just the fact that she’d spent the last five years, ever since her beloved father’s death, ricocheting from one disaster to another, and today that all stopped. It was time. She just needed to make that leap. Literally.
Edging forward she somehow, miraculously, managed to summon the strength to push herself off her seat onto the metal floor, closer to the open hatch, and peer nervously down again.
The wind ripped at her, as though it could pull in even more different directions.
‘I ca...’ She began to mutter the refusal again but this time something stopped her from completing it.
It was time to regain her dignity. The life she’d somehow put on hold for the past five years since her father’s death. In fact, almost five years to the day since her fearlessness had seeped out of her like a punctured rubber dinghy in the middle of a wide, empty ocean.
‘I can do this,’ she told herself fiercely. Out loud. Safe in the knowledge that no one could hear her over the roar.
She wanted to make the jump. She needed to make it. Five years of mistakes and disappointments had to end today. From her marriage, which had been doomed from the start, to the baby daughter she had lost at eighteen weeks. Even the baby that her ex-husband and his new wife would bring into the world barely a month or so. It was time to stop being a victim. To erase this weak, pathetic shadow of a person that she’d somehow become and rediscover the fierce, happy woman she’d once been.
Sitting on the cold, metal floor, paralysed with fear, wasn’t part of the plan. And she hated herself for it. She reached out her arms and tried to shuffle across the floor on her bottom, but despite her best efforts her body refused to comply.
‘I have to do this,’ she choked out, desperately willing herself to move.
She was letting people down. She was letting herself down. She felt exposed, vulnerable, worthless.
Her head snapped around at the movement in her peripheral vision to see Kaspar edging his way through the plane. As if he knew exactly what was going on. As if the last fifteen years were falling away and they were once again the teenagers they’d been when she’d last seen him. As if he was still every inch the superhero he’d always been to her, even when she’d been nothing more than the annoying kid sister.
She should be more shocked. Shouldn’t she?
He couldn’t be coming to her aid. He wasn’t that boy any more.
So what was hammering in her chest harder than the vibration of the aircraft engines? Had he recognised her after all?
‘Everything okay?’ he yelled. Concerned but with no trace of recognition.
Archie stared helplessly, attempting to shake off the irrational hurt that needled her. Why would he recognise her? It had been fifteen years and she’d liked to think she no longer looked quite like the gangly kid she’d been when he’d last seen her. It wasn’t even as though her name would mean much to him, even if he could hear it over the roar of the engines. Archie was a name she’d only settled on in her later teens, and she doubted he’d ever even realised her name was