He Shoved Her Into a Luggage Cart — Then Found Out She Owned Half His Private Jet

Chapter 03 - Walt's Daughter

Kayla's father used to say the same thing every time she handed him a wrench the wrong size.

"Measure twice. Sign once."

It didn't just mean tools. He meant it about everything, contracts, marriages, apologies. He'd built half of Meridian's original fleet maintenance program with his own two hands and Marcus's borrowed money, back when the hangar was one leaking Quonset hut and a single Cessna nobody trusted.

Kayla grew up under that Cessna, literally, napping on a moving blanket while her father worked the underside of an engine cowling.

She didn't tell people that anymore. It didn't fit the uniform.

That night, after Grant left, she sat in her truck in the hangar parking lot with the engine off, rain drumming the roof, and let herself shake for exactly ninety seconds. Then she stopped.

*Not here. Not yet.*

She drove to Priya's place instead of home.

Priya Nasser answered the door in reading glasses and a Blackhawks sweatshirt, looking like she'd already guessed something was wrong before Kayla said a word.

"You look like you shoved someone into a jet engine," Priya said.

"Other way around," Kayla said. "Mostly."

She told her everything. The shove. The reveal. The drawer. Her father's initials on a document dated four years after his funeral.

Priya didn't interrupt once. She just poured two glasses of wine neither of them touched and listened with the stillness of someone building a case in her head in real time.

"You know what that means," Priya said finally. "If someone forged Walt's initials four years after he died, they weren't hiding from him."

"They were hiding from whoever came after him," Kayla said. "Me."

"Or Marcus."

"Marcus's signature is in the folder too," Kayla said. "Traced. Not real."

Priya sat back. "So either somebody's setting Marcus up to take the fall if this ever surfaces, or,"

"Or it's someone inside who's had access to both of their signatures for years," Kayla finished. "Which is a very short list."

She thought of her father's old desk in the back office, still there, untouched except for dust, because nobody had the heart to clear it out. She thought of the photographs pinned above it. Walt and Marcus, twenty years younger, grinning in front of that one leaking Cessna.

"Why didn't you tell Marcus you were buying Denny's shares," Priya asked. Gently, because she already half knew the answer.

"Because the second anyone in that hangar knew I was going to own part of it," Kayla said, "they'd stop showing me who they really are. I needed six more months of watching people be honest around me by accident."

"And now?"

"Now I don't have six months," Kayla said. "Grant knows. Which means by Thursday, everyone will."

Priya finally picked up her wine glass and drank half of it in one go.

"Then we stop being quiet too," she said. "I'll pull Meridian's FAA filing history tomorrow. Cross-reference the tail numbers in your folder against public incident reports. If there's a pattern, it'll show."

"And if it shows something worse than forged paperwork?"

Priya met her eyes.

"Then it shows something worse than forged paperwork," she said, "and we deal with that too."

Kayla nodded, throat tight in a way she didn't let show on her face. She reached into her vest pocket and turned her father's pen over twice between her fingers, the metal worn smooth where his thumb used to rest.

*Measure twice.*

She'd been measuring for eleven months.