The Cost of Wings, and Other Stories

1914: the golden age of risk, when pilots were rock stars and every flight was a gamble with death. Richard Dehan's collection opens with a piercing study of Sheldrick, a celebrated aviator who returns from his victories drunk on glory and the roar of engines, while his wife Ella counts the cost in sleepless nights and near-misses. She doesn't compete with another woman for his heart, but with the sky itself. When she finally demands he choose between the cockpit and their marriage, the confrontation lands with the weight of genuine tragedy, not melodrama. The stories that follow continue this ruthless examination of what humans sacrifice for glory, for love, for the intoxicating rush of pushing against mortality's edges. Dehan captures the early aviation age with sharp, unsentimental precision, when flight was miraculous and deadly and the men who pursued it were half heroes, half addicts. The collection endures because it asks a question that never ages: can we love someone whose deepest calling might kill them, and at what point does admiration become a form of self-destruction?