Page 321 of Every Almost

"I hadremarks."

Charlie laughed before she went back to her diagnostics, and for a while they just worked, side by side.

Then Tavi said, not looking up, "You're staying, right?"

Charlie's hands went still on the console. Because Tavi didn't know and, as far as the crew was concerned, Charlie was the Chief Engineer alongside he and Maren.

She thought about the wordremoved.

"Yeah," Charlie said, and made herself believe it, because Reyna had told her to. "Yeah, Tavi. I'm staying."

"Good," he said simply. "Because I just retrained the entire music library on your taste and I'm not doing that again for somenewengineer."

"Wow."

"It took weeks."

"That's really touching, Tav."

"I'm a deeply sentimental man." He flicked something across to her console. "Now look at the harmonic drift on coil three."

She looked and they went back to work.

REYNA

Kess was waiting for her outside the Bridge, which wasn't a good sign, because Kess only left the Med Bay to corner people.

"Walk with me," Kess said.

"I have a ship to run."

"It'll survive ninety seconds without you. Walk."

Reyna sighed and fell into step beside Kess.

They went down the quiet stretch of corridor outside the Bridge, and Kess didn't say anything for a moment.

"So," she started. "Your cortisol levels."

Reyna stopped right in the middle of the corridor.

"Oh, for the love of?—"

"Are fantastic." Kess said, interrupting Reyna and turning to face her. " You are, by every marker I have, the least stressed you have been since I met you."

Reyna couldn't help the small smile start to spread across her face.

"I just want you happy," Kess stated. "That's all I've ever wanted. And I don't care what you say, you weren't." She walked closer to Reyna. "You were good. You were good at being a Captain. You were good at being a crew member. You were good at taking care of all of those around you. No one has ever had a single bad thing to say about you. They still don't." Kess paused. "I think."

Kess smiled while Reyna gave off a soft laugh.

"But happiness was never there. And that killed me every day."

Reyna looked into Kess's eyes and saw nothing but warmth and care.

"But then she came along," Kess continued, her emphasis onshenot entirely free of frustration. "And Rey, I see something I haven't seen before in you."

Reyna took a shaky breath. "What's that?"