She moves her head slowly, tracking across the mementoes taped to the wall. The photo of Jules smiling, the reality she remembers more incandescent than any version she projected: her own fear, her own insecurity muddying the lens. She keeps turning, past the flags of their many allegiances, Spain and Iceland and the Czech Republic and the EU’s gold stars on blue, a child’s drawing of the immensity she’s seeing through her window. Finally, her eyes come to rest on the empty chair beside her.

It doesn’t matter why. But she still searched like a madwoman, as if finding the reason would enable her to start again, have another chance to get it right. By the time she found the damage from the collision, Peregrine’s clumsy repair that cross-wired her and Santi’s compartments, there was a hole in her too, and it was pulling her apart from the inside. He thought you were me, and I was you. For a crazed, grief-drunk moment, it was true. She hadn’t lost Santi: she had lost herself. She knew, even as she pressed her forehead to the cold metal wall, that it wouldn’t have made any difference: he would have insisted, as she did, and she would have let him, because of who they are.

She let him go, as he wanted. Set him loose among the stars. Now, strapped in the seat of the lander, she thinks of him drifting forever, open-eyed, face-to-face with his God at last. She wonders how she can feel so full of him and so empty at the same time: a paradox, a trick of physics she will never understand. As baffling as how she knew all of him and yet there was an infinity left to discover. She thinks of all the people waiting for him, people she will have to tell if she makes it back alive. Héloïse, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, who they all knew would marry him one day. Jaime, who came to visit when she and Santi were doing their basic training in Cologne, spending a wild evening crawling the bars of the old town. His parents, who came to see him off, his father alight with pride and his mother a wreck of premature grief, as if she already knew what was going to happen. His sister Aurelia, and Estela, his niece, their borrowed daughter. Félicette, who won’t ever understand why he didn’t come home. For some reason, that is the one that breaks her. Sobs take her over, until her body is nothing but a channel for her bursting grief. Finally she’s crying for him, and he can’t see it.

She has to control herself. She holds her breath until the sobbing stops. “Get it together,” she says out loud. Like folding the universe into a box, she pushes her grief down. She has a mission to complete, and she has to do it alone.