Treatment lasted fourteen months.
For seven of those months, Northstar became the place where Caleb could temporarily pretend his life was normal.
He showed up early.
Worked.
Went home.
Took Carolyn to appointments.
Worked nights when needed.
Ronan covered shifts.
Marissa traded weekends.
The old operations director, Thomas Keene, told Caleb not to worry about time off.
“Take care of your wife.”
Caleb never forgot that.
Carolyn died when Nora was five.
The first Christmas afterward almost broke him.
Nora asked whether Santa could bring Mommy back.
Caleb went into the bathroom and cried into a towel so she would not hear.
After that, Christmas became something he worked hard at.
Not because he loved the holiday.
Because Nora did.
She deserved lights.
Cookies.
Paper snowflakes.
Bad Christmas music.
A tree.
Especially a tree.
Their apartment was small, but each December they found a little tree no taller than Caleb’s shoulder and covered it with more ornaments than it could reasonably support.
Nora always put the star on top while sitting on his shoulders.
That was tradition.
This year, money was tighter than usual.
Rent had gone up.
Nora had needed new glasses.
Caleb’s truck required a water pump in November.
He had used most of his savings covering those expenses.
He was not broke.
But the margin was thin.
He had checked his account balance twice that week.
Eight hundred forty-three dollars.
Rent due January first.
Utilities.
Groceries.
Christmas.
He had already purchased Nora’s main gift, a beginner’s telescope she had been asking for since summer.
It sat hidden in Ronan’s garage because Nora knew every hiding place in Caleb’s apartment.
The tree would cost maybe sixty dollars.
Not much.
Until suddenly every dollar mattered.
And that morning, after being fired, the sixty-dollar tree became the first thing Caleb mentally removed from the budget.
The events leading to his termination had begun two weeks earlier.
Northstar Executive Aviation serviced and managed private aircraft for corporate clients.
Business jets.
Charter aircraft.
Privately owned planes belonging to executives, athletes, touring musicians, companies and wealthy families.
The maintenance division operated around the clock.
Most customers rarely saw the technicians.
They arrived at a clean terminal.
A plane waited.
They boarded.
Everything worked.
That invisibility was the point.
Good aircraft maintenance was invisible when done correctly.
Northstar had built its reputation on that.
Then Graham Voss arrived.
Graham was forty-five, polished, ambitious and deeply interested in numbers.
He had previously worked in operations for a larger aviation services corporation.
The board hired him after Thomas Keene retired.
Graham was not an aviation mechanic.
That did not make him unqualified.
Northstar needed someone who understood scheduling, cost control, utilization and client relationships.
At first, Caleb liked him.
Graham asked questions.
He spent his first week walking the hangars.
He met technicians.
He remembered names.
He talked about efficiency without using the word layoffs.
Then the pressure began.
Aircraft turnaround targets tightened.
Overtime approvals became harder.
Parts orders were questioned.
Preventive maintenance was increasingly treated like a negotiation.
None of those changes were automatically dangerous.
Every business had budgets.
But gradually, Caleb noticed something troubling.
The schedule had become the thing everyone was expected to protect.
Even when the aircraft should have been protected first.
The conflict came over N482KS, a midsize business jet owned by Meridian Holdings, one of Northstar’s largest clients.
The aircraft had arrived for routine servicing four days before a scheduled executive flight.
Caleb was lead technician on the inspection.
During functional testing, he noticed an intermittent abnormality in one of the aircraft’s primary hydraulic systems.
Not catastrophic.
Not dramatic.
But wrong.
The pressure did not remain where it should under certain conditions.
Caleb repeated the test.
Same issue.
Ronan checked.
Same result.
They inspected further.
The initial cause was unclear.
Possibly a worn component.
Possibly a developing leak.
Possibly something else.
Caleb wrote the discrepancy.
Grounded the aircraft pending further inspection.
That should have been the end of the discussion.
It was not.
Meridian’s chief executive needed the aircraft Thursday morning for a trip involving several major investors.