After a while she set her cup down. "So. You didn't call me in here to watch you not drink coffee. What is it you actually want to know?"

"Your read on Blackwatch." He gave them both the professional exit, because it was there to take. "I inherited a team and an empty Team Leader seat with a temporary Lieutenant standing in it. I'd rather hear about the unit from someone who's in it than from a briefing packet. You've had eyes on that team since you came aboard. Tell me what I'm holding."

"Ah." Something in her settled, the shift from the personal into the work, familiar ground for both of them. "It's a good unit. Better than it has any right to be for how new most of it is. The people are the real thing. Every one of them volunteered and every one of them earned the seat, and that shows in how they carry it. They're serious in the way that matters."

"And the empty Team Leader seat?"

"It's a problem you'll want to solve. It isn't a fire." She turned it over before she committed, the way she did with everything. "The Lieutenant that Vance sent over is competent. He knows the standards, he keeps them sharp, he doesn't pretend the seat is his. But he's also a placeholder and the team knows it. A unit like that can only run on a placeholder for so long. They'll follow him because they're disciplined. They'd follow the right permanent Team Leader because they believed in them. On the kind of work Blackwatch does, that gap is the whole thing." She looked at him. "You'll want to find your own. Someone the team chooses as much as you do. Don't rush it. Don't leave it too long either."

"That's more or less what Vance told me."

"Vance is usually right." A flicker of something dry, then gone. "The team's ready, for what it's worth. Whatever this border throws at us, they can handle it. I've run the signals side of two of their exercises now, and I'd trust the people I'd be going through a door with. I don't say that about most people."

"No. You never have."

She held his gaze a moment longer than the conversation strictly needed, and there it was again, the old current still running between them after twelve years and a marriage and a loss and a whole galaxy of distance. Neither of them named it. Both of them knew it was there. Then she picked her cup back up and the moment folded itself away, saved rather than spent.

"I'm glad it was your ship, Wade." Quieter this time. "I don't know what I'm hoping comes of that yet. But I'm glad."

"So am I." He didn't reach for anything more than that. There was time. For the first time in a long while there was time, and the two of them sat with the coffee going cool between them and the stars holding steady outside, in no hurry at all to name why that felt like something.