Blinking away tears, Shastri lowered his gaze. “But then, just a few weeks later, you suddenly fell silent. I sent messages, but got no reply for nearly a month. I was panicking and fearing the worst even before I got your message. That… that cold, distant message, as if from a stranger, telling me that you had… no memory of me.” He winced. “It was devastating. How could I believe such an outrageous claim? And how little must I have meant to you, that you’d toy with my affections like that and not even give me the courtesy of a credible excuse for dumping me? It felt like you were insulting me on purpose, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why.”

Shastri rose from the table, unable to sit still anymore. He ran his fingers through his short black hair as he gathered himself. “Long story short—too late—I dealt with my pain by moving to Penthara, throwing myself into the work of building a new colony. I tried to forget my old life, to start over.” A smile began to return to his features. “And I did. Build a new life, that is. I made new friends… eventually fell in love and settled down.”

He pulled a small holo-imager from his pocket and activated it, displaying the image of a striking, purple-haired Catullan woman and a small boy blending her features and Shastri’s. “My wife, Sudo. Our son, Kiran.”

Uhura smiled at the picture, blinking away tears of her own. “They’re lovely. I’m glad things turned out well for you.” She hesitated. “I hope… now that you understand I was never lying to you… that we can…”

His tone sharpened. “What? Put it all behind us? Go back to the way we were? It’s too late for that, Nyota. What happened on Argelius—it changed everything. Nothing could go back to the way it was before. Nothing should.

“But what we almost had—what we had for one brief shining moment—you cast that aside forever.”

“I couldn’t help it,” she protested. “I couldn’t remember.”

“But you could have tried!” Glancing at Spock, he took a deep breath to calm himself. “Yes, I was furious. I thought you were lying. I sent you that angry letter saying I never wanted to speak to you again. But you accepted that. You… you told me just now that you felt a powerful surge of emotion when you saw my name. You could’ve acted on that. Ignored my angry letter, tracked me down, made me understand.”

Shastri drew in several deep, slow breaths. “Instead, you gave up at the first obstacle. That’s nothing like the Nyota I knew. She would never have given up on trying to communicate.