The door chimed at exactly the time he'd asked for, which told him something before she ever walked in. Wade set down the padd he'd been pretending to read for the last ten minutes and told the door to open, and then Jessica Merida stepped into his ready room for the first time in twelve years, and the intervening decade did the strange thing it always did, folding down to nothing and stretching out forever at the same moment.

"Chief Warrant Officer Merida, reporting as requested." She said it straight, formal, the corner of her mouth giving her away. "Sir."

"Sit down before you hurt yourself." He came around the desk instead of staying behind it, because behind it felt wrong for this. "It's good to see you, Jess. It's been a while."

"Twelve years. Give or take." She took the chair by the viewport rather than the one facing the desk, reading the room the way she read everything, and settled into it. Older now, the way they both were, the auburn hair with a little more weight to it and the same steady green eyes. "You look well. Command seems to suit you."

"Some days." He sat across from her. On the table between them was a pot of coffee he'd had the foresight to order up, and he poured two without asking, because he remembered how she took it. Black, no sugar, the same as it had been on a border station a lifetime ago. He slid the cup across and watched her notice that he'd remembered, and watched her decide not to say anything about it.

"So." She wrapped both hands around the cup. "The USS Rubicon. When the assignment came through with your name on the command line, I read it twice."

"You and me both, when I saw yours on the manifest."

"It's a big galaxy." She said it lightly, but she looked at him when she said it, and let it sit there for a second. "Which is what makes it strange, ending up on the same six hundred meters of it as someone you knew a long way back. I've thought about it more than once since the orders came."

"You think it was a coincidence?"

"I didn't arrange it, if that's what you're asking." A small smile. "I'm a warrant officer with a specialty. I go where the specialty's needed. This ship wanted a SIGINT hand for its Blackwatch element, and there aren't many of us who fit that seat. That's not a conspiracy. That's just the service running out of places to put people who are good at narrow things." She took a sip. "But I was glad it was your ship. That part I'll own."

He turned his cup a quarter-turn on the table, not drinking, just needing his hands to do something. There was a thing sitting between them that he'd known would be there the moment he saw her name, and he decided he'd rather step on it than walk around it for the next six months.

"You heard about Jill."

"I did." She didn't reach for a softer word or a careful phrase, and he was grateful for it. "A long time ago now. I was posted out near Tarod when the word came through, and I sat with it for a while." She was quiet a moment. "And then I did the thing you're not supposed to admit to. I looked you up. Made sure you were still on the active list. Still flying, still standing. And I did it again the next year. A few times after that, over the years. Not often. Just enough to know you were still out there."

He was quiet for a moment. It was a strange thing to be told, that someone had been checking on you from a distance for twelve years, keeping a quiet watch you never knew was being kept. Stranger still was the warmth of it, the way it landed not as intrusion but as something closer to being held without ever having felt the hands.

"You could have called," he said.

"I could have." She turned her own cup now. "There was never a good version of that call. It's hard to phone someone you knew for six months a decade ago and tell them you're sorry their wife is gone without it sounding like less than you mean. So I didn't. I kept an eye out from a long way off and hoped you were all right, and mostly you seemed to be." A pause. "I'm sorry, Wade. I don't think I ever got to say that to you plainly. So I'm saying it now."

"Thank you." He said it simply, and meant it, and let it be enough. Neither of them filled the quiet that came after. Outside the viewport the stars held steady, the ship at station, the pale distant haze of the Neutral Zone somewhere off the bow.