“No,” M’Umbha said. “No, it’s all right.” She forced a smile. “It’s a pleasure to get to see you discover it all over again, binti.” She cleared her throat. “Well, we’ve been monopolizing the conversation too long. I know you came here in search of help with your problem. You believe these space storms popping up all over are connected to you somehow?”

“That’s right.” She went on to spell out the basics of the situation and the connection she’d found to her own music. “We think I must have been conducting some sort of ongoing communications research, but for some reason, I told no one in Starfleet about it. Yet according to everyone I spoke to, if I had told anyone, it would be…” She lowered her head. “My family.”

“Yes,” M’Umbha said, following suit. “You used to share everything with us.”

“I… I’m sure I did. So if there’s anything you can remember that could help—”

“This is outrageous,” Malcolm interrupted. “You don’t owe this… this stranger anything, Mama. Twelve years ago, she forgot us, and she was fine with doing so.”

“Malcolm!” M’Umbha protested. “You know that wasn’t her fault.”

“Losing her memory, no. But she chose not to come back to us after, to reclaim what she had lost. After twelve years of choosing to stay away, she doesn’t get to use that robot as an excuse anymore.”

He turned to Nyota. “Mama is doing a good job of hiding it, but you need to know the pain you’ve caused her, coming back here after all these years just for work, for Starfleet. You only come back now that you need some information from us. Not for Mama and Omar’s wedding, not for Samara’s graduation, not even for Babu Uchawi’s funeral!”

She let his anger wash over her, not feeling entitled to challenge it. “I understand your anger, Malcolm. I just hope you can understand how hard it was for me.”

He held her gaze, and she saw a deeper compassion beneath the anger. “I can’t begin to imagine what you went through. I worked with a few amnesia cases during my residency, but they were usually partial or temporary. And even then, I could barely imagine how it would feel not to recognize your own loved ones.

“Because when members of this family have gone through pain or loss, we have always turned to one another. When our father, yours and mine and Samara’s, died out in space, you came straight home from the Academy and we grieved together. We helped one another endure the loss, and we helped one another heal from it over time.