The drawing was crooked. The airplane’s nose was much too large. The rainbow had seven colors, and one of the stick figures had three arms.
It was the kind of picture a child might produce in ten minutes.
Yet it had reached a part of Elena’s heart that years of professional praise had never touched.
For the first time that day, she stopped thinking about what she lacked.
She thought about what she might have given someone else without even realizing it.
As the aircraft continued toward Florida, the sky gradually changed.
The blue deepened above them, and sunlight spread across the clouds in a brilliant golden wash. Far below, the ocean shimmered like a sheet of glass.
Elena had seen that view hundreds of times.
She had photographed it, admired it, and occasionally taken a moment to appreciate it between checklists and radio calls.
But that morning, it seemed different.
