I return my attention to the podium.
Lyn is demonstrating the device now—the final prototype, the one that actually works, the one she finished three months ago and has been testing in clinical partnership with the Galactic Medical Institute ever since. She has a volunteer from the audience, a Skoll researcher whose chronic nerve condition has been documented in the literature for years. She fits the interface with efficient, practiced movements—the same hands that once set her workstation on fire twice in a single week—and when she asks the volunteer to describe the effect, what she says is that the pain is still there, distantly, but that it has stopped insisting. That it has learned, somehow, to speak more quietly.
The room is very still.
I'm very still.
Solvi has stopped drawing.
There is something almost unbearable about watching someone you love be recognized for the thing you knew they were capable of long before they stopped doubting it themselves. It should feel straightforward—uncomplicated pleasure. It mostly does. But there's a splinter in it somewhere, something small and sharp, which is that I spent a year making it harder than it needed to be.
I have thought about this, and I have talked to Lyn about it, and she has said—in her particular way, half-exasperated andhalf-sincere, the way she says most important things—that the pushing was part of it. That being taken seriously enough to be argued with was part of it. That she used my rubrics as her benchmark because she knew I wasn't going to let her get away with anything, and that she needed that, even when she hated it.
I believe her.
I'm still working on believing her completely.
Lyn concludes the presentation to an applause that starts at the back of the room and builds forward. She thanks her committee, her research partners, the institute. She thanks Thalara, which makes me smile, because Thalara is in the seventh row and has been crying since the demonstration and makes absolutely no effort to hide it. She thanks Riley, who is sitting next to Thalara and not crying—butisglaring at me because he’s still not sold on my presence in Lyn’s life.
Then she looks at the third row.
"And I want to thank," she says, her eyes finding mine, "the most infuriating supervisor I've ever had. Who told me my interface was amateurish, and was right, and who also—" she pauses, briefly, "never once stopped believing the thing would work. Even when he was being a complete pain in my ass about it."
Laughter ripples through the room.
I'm aware that my ears have gone warm.
Solvi, beside me, cackles.
"And Solvi," Lyn adds, "who told me the green jacket was the right call. She was also right."
Solvi sits up very straight. "Obviously," she whispers.
Afterward, in the corridor outside the hall, there's the usual crowd—colleagues with questions, the Stanford pair who want to discuss collaboration, someone from a university on the other side of the galaxy with a card and an expression that suggests the card is important. Lyn moves through all of it with the ease I'vewatched her develop over this last year, the ease that comes from finally being in a room on her own terms.
I stay back. I'm good at staying back. I've had practice.
Solvi tugs on my sleeve.
"I finished it," she says.
She holds out the sketchbook, open to a page she's been working on since we arrived. It's the three of us—rendered in her particular style, precise and a little stylized. We're at the noodle shop, the Nyeri'i hole-in-the-wall in Mythara Village that has become, over the course of this year, something like our place. Solvi has drawn herself in the middle, grinning wide, her tendrils out and animated. I'm on one side, looking—she's drawn me looking the way she always draws me these days, which is to say less like I'm filing an incident report about my own feelings. And Lyn is on the other side, her curls loose, laughing at something.
It's a good drawing.
It's an excellent drawing.
I don't say anything for a moment.
"I'm going to give it to her," Solvi says. Then, with the air of someone delivering a verdict: "She should have it."
"Yes," I say. "She should."
Solvi closes the sketchbook, satisfied. Across the corridor, Lyn has extracted herself from the Stanford pair and is making her way toward us, jacket slightly rumpled now, notes tucked under her arm. When she sees Solvi holding the sketchbook with obvious intent, her expression does something complicated that she doesn't quite manage to control.
Good.
She's still learning.
