Epilogue

We three are on a ship bound for Ktaris. We have six weeks for the trip, two of which will be spent in space. We may stay longer, depending on our reception and on Naomi. She is excited about the trip and our destination. "Mommy, it will be so funny to be on a planet full of people with Ktarian horns - you'll be the one who looks different there!" Gres was right; she needs this, in a way I perhaps could never have seen myself.

Shipboard life is familiar, even when traveling as a passenger instead of as crew. It feels good to be moving again.

I ponder why that is. After seven years of trying to get home, I would have thought I'd never want to travel again. Maybe I'm finding that journeys agree with me, that I can actually thrive in flux, in limbo.

Joe was good at that, at taking life as it came, while staying true to things - the way a compass down-planet points north even as it is carried around the world.

I also have in Gres an excellent model for staying true to things. I understand better, now, that this is what drew him to Starfleet, in a more innocent era. It is what kept his heart centered on me during our long years apart. I called that faith "costly," that day in the counselor's office, but now I can see that breaking faith would have cost him so much more. Staying true is also what compels him to set me free, if freedom should prove to be my truth in the end. That may look like a contradiction, but where he stands it is all of a piece.

I'm trying to learn to love Gres that way too. I'm learning that if we choose to stay together, we can - we must - write our own story, not borrow someone else's template for life.

I've learned so much that now … I don't know a lot anymore. I know where I am today, and why. But I don't know if I'm staying. I don't know if I will stay in Starfleet. I don't know if Gres and I will stay together; if we will try for another baby.

But I do know one thing. If I ever have a son, he will not be named Nicholas. That was the plan, but I'm beyond that plan now. If Gres agrees, if Anne Carey approves, I will name him Joseph.

I'm living unsure of things now, but I'm sure about what Joe gave me, and what I owe his memory.