Page 143 of Fly with Me

Losing Jake had been the worst thing that had ever happened to her. It had made all the other fears look small afterward. It was why she made herself train for the race. It was why she made it on that stupid plane to Disney World.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

And now here she was.

She gripped the seat as the plane lifted into the air.

“Big, deep breaths, Olive,” Esther said softly.

She sucked in a breath through her nose and let it out through her mouth. The fear was still there.

But that was okay.

Because it didn’t own her.

She risked a glance out the window. She hadn’t gotten a chance to look outside at all during the other flight, not that she’d have dared.

“Everything looks so small,” she said, somewhat stupidly. Of course it seemed small. She was up in the air. Thousands of feet up in the air.

Esther exhaled in agreement. “It certainly is a new perspective. Helps you see the forest for the trees… to reverse and bastardize an old aphorism.”

“I know what you mean.”

“When I first started going up in planes, I loved watching everything become the size of toys. You can still see the big things, but everything else sort of fades. Strange how sometimes you can see stuff from the air that you can’t see if you’re standing close to it on the ground.” She pointed to the baseball field with its tall fence around it. “Just a new way of seeing things.”

In a weird way, Olive understood. All the houses seemed to blend together. But a big, shiny lake was obvious from above. The small mountains in the distance. The way the highway off-ramps looked like big clover shapes.

What were the big things in her life?

Her job.

Derek.

Stella.

She shut her eyes tightly, thinking of their last conversation. She’d postmortemed every word several times with Derek since the day of the funeral.

Even the memory of that conversation made Olive flinch. Stella had obviously felt terrible after saying it, but she’d been right too. There were big, important things Olive let fear talk her out of. What did she want? What were her dreams? Not Jake’s dreams. Her dreams.

The dreams she’d scribbled down in the spiral notebook two weeks ago.

To go to Italy. Paris. Cairo. London.

To see all the art she’d read about in college.

But mostly she wanted Stella.

Stella might break her heart, and that was terrifying. But if Stella really did love her, Olive was ready to risk heartbreak for the chance at being with her. Stella had revealed so much in that conversation, but Olive had been too overwhelmed to hear it. It had been a big step for Stella, and Olive had just run off…

She’d let Lindsay fill her mind with the idea that Olive was unworthy of someone like Stella. She’d been so in love with Stella, this was easy to believe.

Now she had a plan, and this lesson had been part of it.

This time she’d be up front. She’d tell her she was in love with her. She’d open herself up to whatever hurt might come in the future because the alternative was worse—losing her without even fighting for her. That was the piece that Stella hadn’t understood. She was so afraid of hurting the person she loved that she was too afraid to fall in love. Olive needed to tell her that she was worth it. Loving her was worth the risk of future heartache. Everything had risks.

“You still with me, Olive?” Esther asked.

Olive jolted. She’d almost forgot where she was. “Oh, um yeah. I’m good.”