Naomi made her way to her seat, annoyed at her dress—a sequined, dark blue affair, the tight skirt hobbling her into small, heeled steps. She’d never liked these fancy soirees. Valerie had dragged her to more than her fair share as a child. Naomi wished she was back at the lab. With a resigned sigh, she looked for her ex-husband. She’d rolled her eyes when she’d seen his name on the guest list. He never turned down an opportunity to come to these things.

Cole Palmer was seated halfway across the ballroom. His head was turned, and he leaned close to his new wife to whisper something in her ear.

Mel Palmer had the same colouring as Naomi, but aside from that they didn’t look much alike. Her dark hair was twisted into a chignon and a sapphire glittered at her throat. They must have been married a year and a half by now. No longer newlyweds. They had a newborn boy at home. Mel had taken the governmental payout, quit her job as a journalist to stay at home with the child for five years. That was the end of that; in five years, she’d be too out of the game to pick up where she’d left off. Naomi didn’t blame her—with the astronomical costs of childcare and the way women were being passed over anyway, Mel had chosen what many other women did when they birthed their first—and, because of the high subsequent children taxes, often only—child.

Naomi was meant to hate Mel, she supposed. Call her a man-stealing harpy or some other epithet. But Mel didn’t take anything that wasn’t already lost.

The Palmers made a handsome couple. She still remembered the first time she’d seen an interview of him on a screen, when she was twenty two and he thirty, fresh-faced and just returned from his mission to the nearest planet. The lines around his eyes were a little deeper now that he was nearing his late thirties, and there was a tad more silver sprinkled through his hair. He looked the same as he had the last time she saw him three years ago and she’d walked right out of his life. Cole caught her eye, not at all surprised to see her, and flashed that smile that had once worked so well on her.

Naomi dutifully curled her lips, her mind swirling with murky memories, both sweet and bitter. It’d have been easier, perhaps, to still be the one sitting next to him. Too late to wonder. Too late for regret.