He’d saved Jack, at least: still just twenty-one years old, the boy was healthy as an ox and smart as a tack. Maybe that one achievement was enough, to justify Henry’s life.

Now Jack was going to the Moon. But not us, Henry thought. There is nowhere for us, but here.

Jane stirred again. He kissed the top of her head, the thinning hair there, and she settled deeper into sleep.

As it turned out the Karroo was their last trip together, before Jane entered what the doctors delicately called her terminal stage: when their various treatments served no further purpose, and Henry, geologist turned amateur palaeontologist, became a nurse.

Some of what they had to face was much as he anticipated. The painkillers and their side-effects. Her loss of appetite; he learned to cook Lebanese-style, masses of small, spiced dishes, to tempt her. After she was bed-ridden, there was the need to care for her skin: rubber rings, protective pads for her heels and elbows, and a bed cradle to keep the weight of the covers off her legs.

And there were some things he didn’t anticipate. The constipation that doubled her in pain. The soreness in her mouth, which he treated with lip salves, mouth rinses and flavoured crushed ice for her to suck.

He wanted to move her bed downstairs, in their home in Houston, but she wouldn’t accept that. It would be the mark of the end, she said.

She would die upstairs.

Strange thing. He’d been to the Moon, but he’d never seen anyone die close up.

It wasn’t sudden. She slept more, sometimes drifting into unconsciousness, from which he couldn’t rouse her. Her breathing became noisy, like a rattle, but the doctors said it was just moisture on her chest.

Sometimes, though, when she appeared unconscious she was aware, but unable to speak or see. But her hearing probably still worked — hearing was the last sense she lost — and so he spoke to her, reading her letters from Jack on the Moon, or news items, or, just, talking to her.

Until there came a day when she seemed to fall ever more deeply into sleep, and she simply stopped breathing, and that was all.

And Henry knew that he would be alone, for the rest of his life.

4

And ten years more…

Ten years on, ten years older, and here was Henry putting on his spacesuit, fifty-five years old and utterly alone, letting the e-letter buzz in his earpiece for the fourth time, devouring this communication from the nearest thing to a son he ever had.

Dear Dad…