Naomi went back to training, desperate to catch up after her recovery. She pretended she’d contracted a virus, and no one questioned her. Naomi would come back from the Johnson Space Center long past sunset. Each night, she’d stare at Cole’s sleeping back, silently promising him that tomorrow would be the day she came clean. The days kept passing, one after the other, until she’d left it too long. The silence became its own lie, one she was unable to unpick. She often wondered, over the next few years, how he would have reacted. Back then, she’d hoped he’d have been supportive, that he’d understand. Much later, she suspected she had been right not to tell him. That her intuition had been its own warning.

No one at work knew. None of her friends from undergrad or grad school, most of whom had already drifted away, since Naomi was terrible at keeping in touch. A pregnancy that ended before it could truly begin. A missed period that turned into an ellipsis of a promise, then an interrupted dash.

How many women had kept their lips tight over stories of abortions? Farmers’ wives who knew one more baby would mean her other children going hungry. Another with narrow hips whose first birth had nearly been the death of her. Women who could barely afford to feed and house themselves, much less someone else. Those who had faced violence or had abusive partners who would use a child as a weapon. A trans man who would have found pregnancy distressingly dysphoric. A woman who felt the movement within her grow still, but there was still technically a heartbeat. Or women who, plain and simple, didn’t want a child and knew their own body, their own mind, best.

The only one who knew her secret was Valerie. It didn’t occur to her until much later that, if Valerie had wanted to, she could have used that information against Naomi like a knife.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

126 Days After Launch

5 Days to Mars

123 Days to Cavendish

If they’d gone through a wormhole, they would have technically died. So would her child. So would everyone else on board. They’d blink into nothing, shifting from one point of the galaxy to another in an instant. The blueprints of the women and everything on the ship would reassemble in an instant, using new matter, new cells.

If someone were watching the ship from the outside, it would seem as if the ship disappeared, as it moved through space faster than the speed of light. Yet inside, it was all strangely anticlimactic.

They’d closed the covers over the window for additional shielding, but it didn’t feel as though they were going any faster than they had since they’d reached full ion acceleration. Inside the warp bubble, it was exactly the same. It was the universe outside that shifted.