In the Likely Event

In the Likely Event Plot Summary

Introduction

# Fated Crossings: When Hearts Survive What Time Cannot Break Flight 826 plummets through Missouri fog, engines screaming their death song. In seat 15B, eighteen-year-old Isabeau Astor grips the hand of a stranger—nineteen-year-old Nathaniel Phelan, bound for Army basic training. They stare into each other's eyes as metal tears apart around them, finding an anchor in chaos that will haunt them across continents and years. The crash survivors become something more dangerous than lovers: they become each other's obsession. What follows is a decade-long dance with destiny, played out across Georgia beaches and Georgetown apartments, through classified missions and political corridors. Nate disappears into Special Forces shadows while Izzy chases him through the machinery of power, working for senators who promise to end the wars that keep stealing him away. Their story culminates in the crumbling battlefields of Afghanistan, where fate demands its final accounting and two hearts learn whether love can survive what time cannot break.

Chapter 1: The Crash That Started Everything

The Missouri River churns forty feet below as both engines die. Nate adjusts his Saint Louis Blues cap and watches the nervous blonde in his assigned window seat babble about aviation statistics. She clutches antibiotic ointment from her purse like a talisman, reciting blood type and allergies to the universe. Isabeau Astor, eighteen and terrified, somehow makes fear sound charming. The explosion comes without warning. Left engine erupts in flames, right engine coughs and surrenders. As flight 826 enters its death spiral, Nate grips Izzy's hand and forces her to look only at him. "This will be okay," he promises, though screaming metal suggests otherwise. Something passes between them in those final moments—recognition, claiming, a bond that will outlive whatever comes next. They hit water hard but together. The Missouri is ten degrees above freezing, and Izzy bleeds internally while Nate hauls her from the sinking fuselage onto the wing. Her pupils blown wide from concussion, ribs broken, spleen ruptured. But alive. When paramedics arrive, Nate lies without hesitation: "I'm her husband." He signs consent forms with stranger's authority, memorizes her medical information, watches surgeons save a life he's known for three hours but cannot abandon. Army recruiters collect their delayed soldier while Izzy fights for consciousness. Months later, airline recovery teams return a waterlogged olive-green backpack containing a Saint Louis Blues hoodie and an iPod in ziplock protection. Inside tag reads N. Phelan in permanent marker. She has a name now, and with it, the beginning of an obsession that will reshape the next decade.

Chapter 2: Letters Across Continents and Years of Longing

The letters begin immediately after Nate vanishes into military machinery. He writes from training bases and forward operating positions, words carefully scrubbed of operational details but rich with longing disguised as friendship. Izzy responds from her Georgetown apartment, sharing law school frustrations while wearing his hoodie like armor against expectations. They exchange highlighted books and birthday packages across impossible distances. He sends classics marked in yellow ink; she returns romance novels with steamiest passages carefully noted. They plan imaginary vacations to Fiji, debate zombie apocalypse strategies, build relationship that exists entirely in spaces between words. Neither dates seriously. Neither can explain why. Three years pass in letters and satellite phone calls that cut out mid-sentence. Nate writes about pine trees he wants to watch sway with her someday, about teaching high school English when service ends. Izzy confesses her reluctant path through law school, parents' political ambitions, recent escape from Jeremy Covington—trust fund politician her father handpicked for dynastic purposes. When her parents cancel their visit for her twenty-second birthday, Nate appears at her door with Chinese takeout and weekend pass he fought to obtain. Two days pretending they're normal people who can have normal things—lazy mornings, shared meals, movies on couch. But normal people don't navigate classified deployments and security clearances. Normal people don't choose between love and duty with such brutal regularity.

Chapter 3: Perfect Timing That Always Came Too Late

Tybee Island beach, three years after the crash. Nate sits against driftwood, broader now, more scarred, with wariness in crystal-blue eyes that wasn't there before. Izzy finds him by accident—or fate's design—during her college roommate's bachelorette weekend. Recognition is instant, electric, inevitable. "I must have dreamed of you a million times," he says, and she knows exactly who he is before he reminds her of blood type and allergies. They spend the day trading highlighted books and stories of years between. He tells her about his mother's farm, Special Forces selection ahead. She confesses law school reluctance, family expectations, the weight of living someone else's mapped future. In Georgia surf, they finally kiss. Connection that sparked in falling airplane ignites into something that makes them forget the world beyond waves. Izzy wraps legs around his waist as ocean crashes over them, and Nate tastes salt and possibility on her lips. For perfect hours, timing doesn't matter. Geography becomes irrelevant. They exist simply as Nate and Izzy, undefined and infinite. Reality waits on shore like patient executioner. His orders take him to Washington State, then back to Afghanistan. Her life remains in DC, law school, future her parents mapped in political connections. They have one night, and Nate refuses to waste their potential on borrowed time. "Don't wait for me," he begs as she boards her flight. "Live, Izzy. Don't waste your life waiting." She kisses him goodbye and promises nothing, knowing she's already lost.

Chapter 4: The Proposal in Grief and Words Unspoken

The call comes on Tuesday morning. Nate's mother killed in car accident, and Izzy doesn't hesitate. She flies to Illinois for funeral, standing in freezing rain beside man she barely recognizes. Grief has carved new lines in his face, and when his father tries provoking fight at graveside, she sees flash of something dangerous—the soldier he's become, violence he carries like second skin. That night he appears at her hotel door, soaked and shaking, needing her beyond words. They make love with desperate intensity, as if they can hold back death and duty and everything that keeps tearing them apart. For hours there's nothing but skin and breath and promise of forever that tastes like salt and sorrow. Forever lasts until morning. When Nate proposes in her hotel room—dropping to one knee with ring he's carried for months, words tumbling together in grief-stricken desperation—Izzy's heart breaks even as it soars. This isn't the man she fell in love with. This is someone drowning, grasping for anything that might save him from the current pulling him under. "I can't," she whispers, watching something die in those blue eyes. "Not like this, Nate. Not when you're not thinking clearly." He leaves without another word, taking ring and her heart with him. She runs after him, calling his name in rain, but he's already gone. Later she learns he drove straight back to Fort Bragg, threw himself into Special Forces training with single-minded determination. What she doesn't know is that he carries her rejection like shrapnel, embedded too deep to remove, and her ring taped to his best friend's dog tag through every mission that follows.

Chapter 5: War Zones and Wedding Rings

Ten years after flight 826, Izzy steps off military transport in Kabul wearing congressional aide's badge and carrying decade of unresolved heartbreak. She's spent three years working for Senator Lauren, crafting legislation to end wars that keep stealing Nate away. When opportunity arises to join fact-finding mission, she seizes it, knowing he's somewhere in country's collapsing infrastructure. She doesn't expect him to be her security detail. Sergeant Green, they call him now, real name sanitized for operational security. He's harder than she remembers, scarred by years of classified missions and weight of secrets she can't share. Boy who pulled her from sinking plane has become man who kills for living, and distance between them feels unbridgeable as Hindu Kush mountains. But Izzy came for more than closure. Her sister Serena, photojournalist for New York Times, is somewhere in northern provinces, refusing evacuation as Taliban sweeps across Afghanistan. Izzy manipulated her way onto mission with single goal: bring Serena home before country falls completely. The reunion in Mazar-i-Sharif is everything she feared—Serena alive but stubborn, committed to story and unwilling to abandon Afghan interpreter whose visa application remains pending. As provinces fall around them and Taliban closes in, Serena makes her choice. She'll stay until assignment is complete. Izzy returns to Kabul empty-handed, mission failed, heart breaking for sister she can't save. Worse is knowledge that Nate has seen through her carefully constructed facade. He knows why she really came to Afghanistan, knows every choice she's made for past three years has been about him.

Chapter 6: Choosing Love Over Safety and Duty

Final confrontation comes in Kandahar airport under siege, where Izzy volunteers to evacuate girls' chess team whose members trust only her. As mortars explode around them and Taliban closes in, she and Nate work together with efficiency of people who've always been meant to be team. They save seventeen lives that day, loading families onto helicopters as city burns behind them. Real battle is fought in quiet aftermath, in Kabul embassy room where Izzy finally removes Jeremy Covington's engagement ring. She's spent two years engaged to man who represents everything her parents wanted and nothing she needed. Jeremy's arrival in Afghanistan, his casual suggestion of "arrangement" that would allow them both to find satisfaction elsewhere, finally shows her the cage she built around her own heart. "I made a mistake," she tells him, pressing diamond into his palm. "I made a mistake thinking what I felt for you could grow. I made a mistake settling for someone who doesn't know the meaning of devotion." Ring had never been hers anyway. It belonged to woman her parents wanted her to be, not woman she actually was. Nate finds her afterward, sitting on floor in darkness, finally free but uncertain what freedom means. They talk through night about choices that brought them to this moment, decade of near misses and almosts that shaped them both. He's still leaving. She's still staying. But for first time in ten years, they're both exactly where they chose to be, not where duty or family or fear placed them.

Chapter 7: The Final Flight to Their Forever

Five months later, Izzy boards plane to Maldives alone, carrying suitcase full of hope and highlighted books. She's quit her job in politics, finally admitting she only took it to try ending wars that kept taking Nate away. She doesn't expect him to show up—he never has before—but she's going anyway, ready to live for herself instead of just existing in spaces between other people's expectations. "Excuse me, may I walk past?" Voice is familiar, beloved, impossible. Nate slides into window seat beside her, that dimple flashing as he smiles. "I switched flights. Figured if we're going to spend week in Maldives, we should get as much travel time together as possible." "You quit," she says, hardly daring to believe it. "I quit," he confirms. "Got some therapy, sold the farm, decided it was time to stop living for duty and start living for us. What do you say we finally take our shot?" She says yes—the yes she should have given him years ago, yes that's been waiting in her heart through every separation and misunderstanding. As plane lifts off, carrying them toward their future, Izzy finally understands what Nate always knew: some things are worth waiting for, worth fighting for, worth risking everything. Their love story was written in margins of other people's wars, in spaces between duty and desire, in terrible arithmetic of hearts that beat in different time zones. But some stories are worth the wait.

Summary

Their decade-long dance with destiny taught them that timing was luxury, that love was choice made daily in small moments and grand gestures alike. They survived plane crash, multiple deployments, family expectations, and their own stubborn hearts. In the end, they learned that some bonds transcend geography and circumstance, that some people are meant to find each other again and again across whatever distances fate places between them. What began as chance encounter on doomed flight became something far more powerful: proof that love isn't just about finding right person, but finding them at right time, when you're both ready to choose each other over everything else that calls your name. Sometimes the best love stories are ones that take their time, that ripen slowly like fruit on tree, that teach you difference between wanting someone and being ready for them. Theirs was love tested by distance and duty, refined by loss and longing, and finally allowed to bloom in its own perfect season.

About Author

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Rebecca Yarros

Yarros interrogates the complexities of love and resilience, drawing on her personal experiences as a military spouse and advocate for chronic illness awareness. Her works often spotlight the intersection of military life and personal adversity, presenting narratives that are as emotive as they are immersive. This is particularly evident in her "Empyrean" series, which combines the brutal challenges of a dragon-riding academy with the protagonist's struggles with chronic illness. By blending heartfelt romance with fantasy elements, Yarros's books offer readers a chance to explore themes of resilience and love in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.\n\nThe author’s journey from military-themed romance novels to her breakthrough in fantasy romance highlights her versatility and ability to pivot genres while retaining core themes. This transition is best exemplified by "Fourth Wing", the first book in the "Empyrean" series, which became a bestseller and led to significant acclaim. The series not only captures the imagination of its readers but also shines a light on real-world issues, making Yarros’s narratives relatable and impactful. Her works resonate with audiences who appreciate deeply emotional storytelling and authentic depictions of military life and chronic illness.\n\nIn addition to her literary accomplishments, Yarros has received recognition, such as the British Book Award for Book of the Year, underscoring the impact of her writing. Her ability to weave complex themes into compelling narratives has made her a beloved figure among readers who seek books that combine the thrill of fantasy with profound emotional depth. This bio encapsulates her journey as an author whose stories continue to inspire and engage, making a lasting impact on the genre.

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