She moved closer, circling the table to confront him without the holograms in the way. “Then I got a message from you. Another stranger, but the name filled me with such warmth, such assurance. With the same kind of trust I felt for my crewmates, but there was… joy as well. So I reached out, trusting you with my plight, expecting you to be as understanding as everyone around me had.

“Your rejection was the first breach of trust I remembered in my life. It shattered my innocence. You tear into me for not having the courage to reach out to my family, my friends. Well, whose fault do you think that was?!”

He stared at her for long moments, stunned—or shamed—into silence. Uhura allowed herself to take satisfaction in that. “You can’t know,” she told him, more softly but relentlessly. “You can’t possibly know what it’s like to lose everything.”

After a long, loaded silence, he lowered his gaze and spoke very softly. “Yes… in a way, I can.” He met her eyes again, not without difficulty. “Because I lost you.

“For years, Nyota, you were my life. You were the best of my friends, and that’s always been a short list. I’ve always been an introvert, but you invited me in. You were patient with me, unjudging. You… you gave me the confidence to be the person you saw when you looked at me.”

Uhura stared back, startled by his words. They sparked a memory—not of her life before Nomad, but a more recent time, when she had worked with Willard Decker on a program to increase Starfleet’s diversity by promoting nonhuman recruitment. So many of her recruits had told her how grateful they were for the encouragement she gave them, for the sense of acceptance she created. She had believed that she had done it to pay forward what the Enterprise crew had done for her after Maluria—making Starfleet feel welcoming, familial, and accepting despite any impediments. It had never occurred to her that she might have done the same even before the memory wipe—that she had merely continued being the person she had always been.

Shastri went on in an elegiac tone. “I loved you before I even realized it. It just felt so natural, so comfortable, that I never noticed a moment when it started. It just became, without me even putting it into words in my mind.”