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"You okay?" Katie asked after Charlie had battled between the emotions a couple of times over.

Charlie nodded. A moment passed before she decided to ask Katie.

"Did you... get the feeling something was different when we hugged Mom goodbye?" Katie's face fell flat.

"Yeah, I did, but I thought it was just me, so I didn't say anything."

"What do you think it was?"

"I don't know..."

They both stared out the windshield, Charlie watching the traffic and Katie watching the skyscrapers of Los Angeles pass by.

"Maybe it's because we've spent so much time with her, and now we had to say goodbye?"

"Maybe," Charlie said.

"Do you think we should ask?" Katie turned towards Charlie. Charlie thought about it, but figured that if Helen hadn't said anything to them, there probably wasn't anything to worry about. She said as much to Katie.

"We can make sure to call her every day, though, if you'd like."

"Yeah," Katie replied. "I think that would make me feel better. At least in the beginning." And then the conversation ended, nothing more to say, nothing more to discuss. But something still sat in the back of Charlie's mind, unresolved. She chose not to look at it.

That fall,Charlie finished her doctorate and spent the winter sending applications to every propulsion lab in the country. Most of them sent back polite rejections. Caltech's career office told her to be patient. Charlie had never been patient about anything in her life and wasn't exactly prepared to start now.

Then JPL called.

TheJet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA. America's space program. And in the same city she'd spent her time in sincearriving in California, right in Pasadena. Ten minutes from her and Katie's apartment.

This was the place that had sent Voyager past the rings of Saturn, the place that was building the machines that would someday put wheels on Mars, and they wanted Charlie for the Advanced Propulsion Concepts group.

Charlie hung up the phone and sat on the kitchen floor for five minutes. Katie found her there and thought something was wrong until she saw Charlie's face.

"Charlie?" Katie asked, sitting on the floor next to her, a mixture of trepidation and interest on her face, as though her emotions were going to overtake her at any moment. "Who was that on the phone?"

"JPL," Charlie said in a daze. Katie's eyes went wide, but Charlie didn't continue.

"And...?" A moment passed between them, Charlie still sitting on the floor, staring straight ahead, Katie practically bouncing. "Charlie!"

A smile spread across Charlie's face. "I start in two weeks."

Katie screamed so loud the neighbors knocked on the wall, and she hugged Charlie so tight she thought a rib might crack. But Katie's excitement triggered her own, and they spent the better part of the evening on into the early hours of the morning celebrating with takeout, Fleetwood Mac, and laughter. The neighbors knocked on the wall a total of three different times that night, but the girls couldn't care less.

Charlie started at JPL in February of 1989. She walked onto the campus for the first time and looked up at the San Gabriel Mountains rising above the buildings. She thought about Frank and the garage and the day he told her she belonged near engines bigger than his. This was the place. These were the engines. This was where she was always meant to be. And somewhere beneath the pride, she felt the quiet weight of theChallenger. She reminded herself that the reason she was here wasn't just to build, but to build safely. She had taken her first step toward making sure no one else's dream ended seventy-three seconds after ignition.

And lo and behold, she ended up being good at it. Hell, she was better than good. Within weeks, her supervisor had moved her off routine analysis and into experimental work because Charlie kept solving problems that weren't assigned to her. She stayed late, she came in early, she volunteered for projects nobody wanted because they were too hard or too strange, and she made them work. The lab started calling her "the mechanic" because she insisted on getting her hands on hardware instead of just running simulations. She couldn't help it. She needed to feel the way a machine breathed or hummed or pulsed to understand them. She always had.

She and Katie called Helen every Wednesday and they ate dinner together most nights, trading stories about their days about Katie's graduate cohort and Charlie's lab. She went to The Boulevard on Saturday nights with friends and playedRumourson the turntable often. She cooked terrible pasta while Katie critiqued her technique from the couch. The apartment was small and noisy and full, and Charlie was happy.

It was the first time in her life she could say that without a qualification. Not happydespite.Not happyexcept.Just happy.

Then the call came.Almost three years to the day since Frank had passed.

It was a Sunday in March, only a few weeks into Charlie's time at JPL. Helen's voice was steady, but it was the same steadiness Charlie had heard once before, the night Helen calledabout Frank. The kind that's steady because it has to be in order to get through a conversation.

"I need to tell you girls something."

The cancer had been growing for a while, it turned out. The routine tests the year before showed nothing had been there yet, but the doctors thought it had been hiding the way cancers sometimes do, quiet and patient, waiting for the body to stop looking before it moved.