Megan looked at him.

“You never can tell. Pete’s such a tightly corked bottle, it’s almost impossible getting him to spill anything about his private life.”

“I think I had a bit of an inside line,” Gordian said. “Annie and I stayed in contact afterward. UpLink having so many ties to NASA, and she being an executive at the JSC, of course . . .”

“Right, of course . . .”

“Annie would often ask how Pete was doing, ask if I’d say hello to him for her, that sort of thing. And I’d always pass along her best wishes.”

“Right . . .”

“Although Pete never commented or showed much reaction,” Gordian said. “Then after a while Annie stopped sending her regards but would still occasionally mention Pete during our conversations. For the most part wanting to know if he was okay. So I can pretty safely conclude they lost touch.”

“Well,” Megan said. “That seems a logical guess.”

“It does,” Gordian said. “And it’s the reason I find it so interesting that their love bloomed amid the frozen wastes an entire year later, excuse my stale poetic instincts.”

Megan caught a quick glance from him.

“Why the look?” she asked.

“I was just wondering if you had any insights,” Gordian said. “Given that you were with the two of them at Cold Corners.”

Megan quickly shook her head.

“No,” she said. “No insights.”

“You’re sure? I can’t shake this hunch that something or someone helped coax them along . . .”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” she said.

“Oh,” Gordian said. “Because I know you’re about as close to Pete as anyone. Besides Annie, naturally. And that you’ve become very friendly with her since Antarctica . . .”

“I was too busy with my responsibilities as chief administrator to put on a second hat.”

“Second hat?”

“As in social director.”

“Oh,” Gordian said.

“Or matchmaker, if that’s what you’re suggesting . . .”

“Then it was long-time-no-see, I love you for the two of them?”

Megan shrugged.

“I suppose,” she said.

Gordian shot her another glance. “That sounds very un-Nimecian, so to speak.”

“Like I said, you never can tell.” She shrugged again. “I’d better get back to my office, there’s a ton of paperwork that’s been waiting since Friday.”

Gordian nodded, watching Megan rise from the chair opposite him.

“However their match got made, whoever may or may not have given it a kick start,” he said, “it’s wonderful to see Pete and Annie happy.”

Megan paused in front of Gordian’s desk, a dark mahogany affair roughly the size of a fifteenth-century Spanish war galleon.

“Yes,” she said, struggling against an insistent grin. “It really is, isn’t it?”

Port-Gentil sits on the low-lying Ile de Mandji finger peninsula of Gabon amid estuarine swamps and deltas that swell to flood levels in the rainy season, the drainage channels describing its neighborhoods joined by small bridges that are more pleasantly—and safely—crossed on foot than in one of the city’s speeding, careening taxis.