The Color of a Promise (The Color of Heaven Series Book 11) by Julianne MacLean

post-traumatic stress after my accident. A sudden loud noise would often cause me to jump and relive the terror of the Hummer flipping over repeatedly on the road in Afghanistan.
    But it had been nine years since then, and I was mostly over it. On that particular night at the window in my parents’ living room, I knew, intellectually, that I was not in the middle of a war. I was in Cape Elizabeth, enjoying the peace and quiet of the seaside community that was like a second home to me.
    Although it was not so peaceful at 10:17 p.m.
    The noise grew louder, and the walls began to shake. I quickly grabbed my phone and pressed record. I filmed the vase teetering on the coffee table and noticed the lights starting to flicker.
    “Mom, Dad! Get up!”
    My father ran out to the front room, tying the belt on his navy terrycloth bathrobe. “What is it?”
    “I don’t know yet.” I ran to the kitchen and whipped open the front door, recording everything the entire time. I stepped onto the deck with my father close behind me. We both looked up to find the sky over our heads bright orange.
    “Oh, no,” I said, filming the glowing clouds, wondering if we should go back inside or run for our lives.
    “What’s happening?” Dad asked, staring upward with wide eyes.
    My mother shouted at us from behind the screen door. “Get inside!” She opened the door, reached out and tried to pull me back by the fabric of my shirt. I stumbled as I fought to keep my camera focused on the sky.
    The house began to shake, and the terrifying noise was back, only it was different this time, as fire and fragments of steel and metal began to rain down onto the beach and into the shallow waters in the cove.
    “I’m standing on my deck in Cape Elizabeth, Maine,” I said for the benefit of the camera, “recording something that appears to have exploded in the sky.”
    A sudden gust of wind rose up and nearly knocked me over, and I felt the heat from the firestorm.
    The noise became deafening as a huge silver engine dropped out of the sky and landed on the beach with a thunderous impact, causing the sand to splash up like water. I was too stunned to comment on what it might be, although I was certain it was a commercial jet engine.
    Half a second later, another structure crashed to earth, landing in the wooded area just behind the Kettle Cove parking lot. The ground shook beneath my feet, and I had to shield my eyes from the wind, dust, and burning sparks that flew toward the house. Bits of red-hot metal tore through the air, barraging cars and lighting wooden fences on fire.
    When I uncovered my eyes, I recognized what had landed in the trees: the front half of a giant commercial airliner. Around me, the neighborhood was burning, people were running and screaming, and I felt as if I were standing in the middle of the apocalypse.
    All I could do was leap over the deck rail with my camera still running. I began to describe what I was witnessing as I sprinted toward the crash site where the fuselage had landed.

Chapter Eighteen

    Meg Andrews

    National Transportation Safety Board Headquarters
    Washington, D.C.

    “Did any of it go down in the water?” I asked Gary, the investigator in charge, as I followed him down the hall to his office.
    Every phone at every desk was ringing, and the office had gone from quiet to complete pandemonium in a matter of minutes. The other on-call members of the Go Team were still arriving, but I had been in the office from the outset, working late, polishing the prose on my section of an open accident report.
    When Gary called me on my cell to ask me to come in right away, I told him I was already there.
    “Why aren’t I surprised?” he asked with a defeated sigh. “Go turn on CNN, Meg. There’s been an accident with Jaeger-Woodrow Airways—Flight 555. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”
    Since that moment, I had been on the telephone, fielding calls from the media and different government authorities. I had never