But he’d been available and unattached. Outside of phenomenal sex, her affair with Derek Taglioni had been a disaster. She’d just broken up with Yoshimura, and she’d been desperate to prove to herself that she was still desirable, still the ice-blond goddess. Not just a discard. That first time, she’d practically ripped Yee’s clothes off and wrestled him to the floor. For a month, she and Yee had carried on what was clearly “convenience copulation.” And then Ashanti had popped back into regular space.

Out in the black.

Way off course.

The same day Kevina discovered she was pregnant.

The change in Yee had been immediate. He was always there. Good old boring Kim Yee. Say what you might about him, he stepped into the role of father without a second thought. Brought her food during the starving times after the Unreconciled failed to take the ship and were relegated to Deck Three. Placed her welfare and the baby’s before his own. And as the years passed, the man doted on Felix.

Kevina had been the volatile one—and more than once when she and Yee were having trouble, she’d taken up with one of the others. Sometimes with Dek, sometimes with one of the other men in Maritime Unit. A lot of mate swapping went on over the years, but she always went back to Yee. Because of Felix. Because Yee loved his son with all of his heart.

She took a deep breath, eyes on the gently rolling swells they now shot across. The planing launch slapped them with rhythmic impacts she could feel through the hull.

What did the relationship mean for her now? For Felix? For Yee?

Since moving into the Pod, they’d been constantly at work. She’d been setting up, testing, and calibrating her sensors, studying maps, plotting wind patterns, and wondering where the currents ran. He’d been endlessly working with Shinwua on his robots and UUVs.

So, if Yee had come, what would it have been like? Left to themselves, alone as a family at last, could she and he have found anything in common outside of their son?

The beeper on the GPS sounded, indicating that she’d reached her position fifty kilometers out. Throttling back, she let the launch slow, the wake lifting the stern and rocking them forward.

“We’re here?” Felix asked, looking around at the ocean.

“We’re here.” She stepped back to the buoy where it rested just forward of the fantail. “Want to help me?”

“Okay.”