“No,” I said, the panic I’d been waiting for arriving in full, sudden force. “Don’t leave.” But as hard as I tried, I stillcouldn’t say it. I couldn’t say the words. But maybe I didn’t have to. Maybe there was another way. “Can I send you something?”
“Of course,” he said. “Anything. Anything you need.”
Closing my eyes, I sent him the stream of pics and vids of Jonathan I’d been watching. When I opened my eyes again, his were distant, his gaze unfocused, his lips pressing together as a tear tracked down his cheek. As I watched his heart break right in front of me.
After a long moment, he asked, “Is this…? Is he?—”
I commed, because it was easier that way. Swiftly, like a river rising over its banks, the words burst out of me. “I was going to have a busy week planning the New Year’s celebration on my old ship, and my parents had offered to watch him. So I put him on a shuttle back to Tranquis. It was a Class-Two Euphonia.”
Freddie cursed under his breath.
“As you probably know, the Class-Twos were all scrapped after several accidents due to a faulty reactor. Unfortunately”—I swallowed hard—“we were one of those several. They promised me it happened quickly, that he didn’t feel any pain. But he was all alone. I should have been with him. I shouldn’t have sent him at all. I should have known I was putting him in danger. I should have sensed it, felt it somehow. That was five years ago today. And soon, he’ll have been gone longer than he was ever here.”
Taking a deep, trembling breath, Freddie said, “He was beautiful.”
I tried to smile. “He was. And funny. He was really, really funny.”
Running his thumbs over my knuckles, Freddie gently worked my fists open. “I am so, so sorry.”
“Me too,” I said with the most useless shrug.
We sat for a while that way, holding hands, not speaking. Until I admitted, “This is why I can’t be with you. Why you shouldn’t want to be with me. I am a broken woman, Freddie. I don’t think I’ll ever get over this. I’ll never get better. I’ll never move on. I’m scared all the time. I’m scared of getting too close. I’m scared of losing someone else. I’m scared of my memories, but I’m also scared of forgetting. I’m just…so scared.”
So softly I had to strain to hear him, he said, “I had a wife.”
My head whipped up. “What?”
“I was married,” he said, his gaze still pinned on our clasped hands. “We were high school sweethearts. I loved her. So much.”
The floor beneath me vanished. My mouth went dry, my throat spasming, and I gulped empty air. “Freddie.”
“Massive pulmonary embolism,” he continued. “The worst three words I know, in any language. One minute, she was fine, and the next, she was gone. Just like that, in my arms.” He blinked, another tear slipping free. “Her name was?—”
“Serena,” I finished for him, my chest caving in on itself, coring me out.
Looking up at me again, his jaw clenching, he nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about her. And when you said her name, when you asked who she was, I should have reacted better. But it was so unexpected, how much I still missed her, how badly hearing her name?—”
“Hurt,” I said, because he didn’t need to explain. I understood, felt the pain of it in my own bones.
“I lost Serena over ten years ago, but sometimes it stillfeels like it was yesterday. And on the anniversary of that day, I don’t get out of bed, even now.”
I hadn’t thought it was possible for my heartbreak to claw itself even deeper into me. But that was the thing about grief: there was no bottom.
“I’m not telling you about Serena for sympathy or to diminish your loss,” he told me, squeezing my hands. “I just wanted you to know, that’s all. I wanted you to know that you’re not alone. And that you are not the only broken person here.”
It was such a heartfelt sentiment. But it was also so wrong. Because he had no idea, and he deserved one. He deserved to know how messed up I really was. So I wiped a tear away from his cheek, rubbed the wetness between my finger and thumb, and told him the truth.
“I have never cried for him, for Jonathan,” I said, knowing it would be the end of whatever remained between us. “Not when my parents called to tell me he was gone, not during the funeral, not even after, when I told my parents I couldn’t see them again, that it was too hard to be around family, around them. Who does that? What kind of mother doesn’t cry for her dead child?”
He said nothing. Because what was there to say? He only sat there for a long while, his eyes wet while mine remained dry. I waited for him to leave. To get up, say goodbye, and leave me for good.
But he didn’t leave. Instead, with his voice carrying over the muffled roar of crashing waves still rolling through the room, he asked, “Have you ever been to Neptune?”
I shook my head.
“Have you heard about its terraforming? Its people?”
“Only a little.” Neptune’s inhabitants rarely left theirplanet. There were rumors about the type of people who lived there—nomadic, fierce, dangerous.
