The Flight Into Fog

The Uber driver didn’t speak.

Sloane didn’t ask questions.

She sat in the back seat, the crimson letter folded neatly into the inside pocket of her wool coat, a small suitcase at her feet. Morning rain turned the streets to mirrors, Brooklyn dissolving behind her like the end of a dream she hadn’t quite woken from.

Elandra Isle.

It wasn’t on G****e Maps. The email confirmation came from a blank domain—no details, no itinerary. Just: Your seat has been arranged. And directions to a private terminal at JFK.

It felt like a trap.

And yet, she’d packed anyway.

Because no one writes you in blood-colored ink unless they know how to dig deep.

And he always knew.

At the guarded gates a man in a black suit waved her through without expression. Beyond it, a sleek jet shimmered like polished bone beneath the misting sky.

Sloane stepped out, pulse stuttering as she looked up at the aircraft. She couldn’t tell if the tightness in her chest was fear or something worse.

Hope.

A flight attendant, pale and polite, ushered her inside. The cabin was near silent. Cream leather. Dark wood. No passengers. No questions.

Just her.

The jet took off smoothly, and New York vanished beneath a veil of clouds. She curled into the window seat, knees drawn up, forehead resting against cool glass. The Atlantic stretched below like a steel sheet, indifferent and endless.

Six hours into the flight.

They were heading southeast, just past the Azores, near nothing, bordered by nowhere. A private island in international waters. Isolated. Chosen.

Somewhere you don’t end up by accident.

Sloane closed her eyes. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. Not her best friend Rory, not her agent, not even her reflection. There was something sacred in the silence. Dangerous, but sacred.

She could still see his handwriting on the page. The way her name had looked. Intentional.

Theo.

She hadn’t spoken his name aloud in two years. Not since she’d scrubbed him out of the final chapter of her novel and told herself that was closure. But the letter, the drama of it, the performance…it reeked of him.

He always did know how to make silence feel like a dare.

Somewhere mid-flight, half-asleep and drifting, she’d felt it, that hum in her chest, that old rhythm he used to bring out of her without trying.

She thought of a summer night. His hand on hers, guiding a pen across her palm like a secret. The way he’d murmured, “You always flinch when it matters.”

She’d laughed. He hadn’t.

It wasn’t the memory that haunted her now, it was how close it still felt.

Like he’d never left.

The pilot’s voice broke the stillness:

“Final descent. Ten minutes.”

She leaned forward. Through the thinning clouds, the island emerged. Wild cliffs wrapped in pines, mist rising off black sea like breath. At the center, high and impossible, a mansion clung to the ridge like a crown. No docks. No roads. Just a carved-out landing strip surrounded by forest.

The jet touched down so smoothly it felt unreal. Like the ground had reached up to catch it.

When the door opened, cold ocean air slid under her coat. Salt. Stone. Something older and nameless kissed her skin.

She descended the steps slowly, suitcase in one hand, heart kicking at her ribs.

Then she saw him.

Waiting at the edge of the runway. Hands in his coat pockets. Wind in his hair.

Theo.

Time hadn’t softened him. He still looked like a story left unfinished, sharp, spare, impossible to ignore. A ruin that refused to fall.

His jaw was more cut, his posture looser, but those eyes…

Still darker than night with specks of gold.

Still watching her like she was a puzzle he meant to take apart.

Her breath caught.

“I thought you were in London,” she said.

A lie, thin and practiced.

He smiled. It didn’t touch his eyes.

“And I thought you burned every bridge,” he said. “Yet… here you are.”

She didn’t respond.

She didn’t need to.

Because this wasn’t just about the letter.

Or him.

It was about the story.

The one she never finished.

And it was waiting to unravel.