Page 257 of Every Almost

Reyna's mind whirled while her ears rang. It felt as though her brain was rejecting everything she'd just heard. Because it was.

And so was her heart.

She had been so goddamn careful.

Every night, Reyna didn't reach. Every hour, she held gold until her spine ached. Every time Charlie said her name, she let it go past her like it was nothing.

And for what.

She had done all of it to keep from feeling exactly what she was feeling right now, standing in her office at the end of the best night of her life, and here it was anyway, every bit of it, arriving right on schedule.

I could have told her.

That was it. That was the worst part. Months of nights in that room and she could have said it, and she would still be standing here now, except Charlie would know.

She would know that she is the best thing that has happened to me in seventy-five years.

She knew what she'd been doing. That was what made it unbearable.

She had kept Charlie at arm's length for six months on purpose, deliberately, every single day, and she had told herself it was for her own protection. That the distance was the thing keeping her safe.

And it turned out the distance was the injury.

Reyna sat at her desk with her hands shaking and understood, far too late, that the pain she had spent six months trying to avoid was not the pain of losing Charlie Wickett.

It was the pain of never having reached for her at all.

"Reyna," Vondra said, and the sound had a genuine concern in it now, low and unmistakable.

Reyna couldn't have cared less.

"I know what she is to that ship."

"You do not know one thing about what she is," Reyna snapped.

"Captain—"

"Do not." Reyna was on her feet. "Do notCaptainme. Not now."

"Reyna, listen to me?—"

"No. You listen." Her voice sounded completely unlike her own. "You will tell that committee that they are removing the best engineer in this fleet from a ship that cannot run without her, all because she was born in the wrong place. You will tell them that I, Reyna Solas, said so. You will tell them that they have never met her, and they probably never will, and yet they are going to sit in a room anddiscuss her placementlike she's a piece of goddamn salvage?—"

"Reyna," Vondra said, interrupting once again.

Four times.

Reyna let her.

"I have said all of it. I said it for over six hours. It is on the record and will go in the appeal. But I am telling you, as your friend, that it will not be enough."

And that stopped her.

Because there was one thing Reyna could always count on with her Admiral, and that was that Vondra didn't lie. She didn't soften things or sugar-coat them, even if the information wasdifficult to deliver. But more importantly, Vondra never used the wordfriend.

Reyna stood in her office with her hair down around her face. Her hands were shaking violently and her gold was holding, holding, holding.

"Fuck the committee," Reyna said.