Not long after, Amelia realised that it was getting late. After all, this was supposed to have been just a short stop on the way home. As much as she wanted to keep talking, she had important lectures to attend to in the morning. As she was putting on her coat in the hallway and thinking about the next day's schedule, she recalled what Lily, who was nearby, absent-mindedly fiddling with the parts of the wrecked plane, had mentioned earlier. Amelia smoothed her jacket and then gazed at the wrecked plane.

 “To think... after all that.” Lily turned to look at her inquiringly. “This... this is how we meet. Because of a crashed plane. Again.” Amelia gave her friend a slightly sad smile. To her surprise, Lily smiled back again, albeit briefly.

 “This may be the first time I am glad of making a mistake.”

 “A mistake?”

 “Not securing this antenna properly, leading to the crash.”

 “Ah. Well, when you put it that way, I’m glad you messed up, too.” Amelia looked contemplative. “How did you end up flying these things to begin with, though? It doesn’t seem like that common of a pastime. Even less so for a woman.”

 “I have never been in a real plane, but whenever I saw one, it reminded me of you, and what you told me about flying with…” She hesitated. “With your parents.”

 “But how did that lead to radio-controlled planes specifically?”

 “The work I do. Translations. It is a somewhat odd profession for someone who has always had trouble communicating. But I can do the work from home, and it turned out that a good memory is also good for learning languages,” Lily replied with a slight shrug. She was lost in thought for a moment. “Oh. I ended up translating a manual for a plane model similar to this. It got me thinking about those stories of flying, and not long after, I found myself buying one just to try. Turned out I quite like it. It is rather relaxing for the most part.”

 “What a strange sequence of events,” Amelia mused. She wondered how she even managed to tell those ‘stories’ to Lily back then, given how averse she’d become to anything related to flying after the crash. She’d refused to do so with anyone else, after all, but clearly, it had been for the better that she’d told Lily. She shook her head at the coincidence before eventually continuing, “But you’re working from home, huh? So, no getting up early in the morning for you to worry about, I suppose. I, on the other hand, should get going as I really do have an important lecture in the morning. We have each other's numbers now, and well, I know where you live” – she said the last part with her best horror movie impression, earning a blank look from Lily – “so let's meet up again soon, okay? We'll have plenty of time to talk. And at least to me, you seem to be doing just fine on that front now, so I look forward to it.”

 “Not as well as you think,” Lily reiterated, sighing.

 With a smile and an amused shake of her head, Amelia headed for home in higher spirits than she could remember being in a very, very long time. Unfortunately, those high spirits were soon to be dampened by a night filled with woefully familiar nightmares of crashing planes.

 After her guest had left, Lily went to sit on the recliner and ended up staying there for nearly three hours, outwardly more or less just staring at the point where the wall and roof met. Inwardly, her mind was bouncing all over the place. After her initial minor meltdown, she had managed to hold it together, but no matter how glad she was of the reunion, it also left her exhausted with all the emotions and memories racing back and forth inside her. And despite that exhaustion, her mind still refused to calm down. Even as she realised how late it was and felt like she should go to sleep, she also felt afraid to, as if what had happened would then become just a dream. And that very fear of meeting her friend again, having been nothing but a fleeting daydream or a hallucination, was what had suddenly hit her so hard once she'd invited her in, as illogical as such thoughts might seem to others.

 However, to her, it certainly wouldn't have been the first time dreaming about meeting her long-lost friend again and waking up to crushing disappointment. In fact, during the very first night after learning Amelia had been taken away from the children's home, she’d had a vivid dream where she woke up in the morning to find her friend sleeping in the bed next to her, just like almost every morning for the past two years. The caretakers didn't quite know what to do with her when she refused to leave her bed for nearly the entire day, insistently trying to fall asleep to return to her dream. Any attempt to remove her from the bed had been met less than gently, and in the end, they’d given up.

 She really hadn’t wanted Amelia to leave, but she knew she’d likely just scare her off by being too insistent. She hoped she wouldn’t end up disappointing her friend, who seemed to think she was doing so well. With such thoughts going round and round in her head, she finally fell asleep on the recliner. Her dreams were not of the serene kind either.