Bean got up in the night, as usual, to get little Ender so Petra could nurse him. Tiny as he was, he had a pair of lungs on him. Nothing small about his voice.

And, as usual, once the baby started suckling, Bean watched until Petra rolled over to feed the baby on the other side. Then he slept.

Until he awoke again. Usually he didn’t, so for all he knew it was like this every time. Because Petra was still nursing the baby, but she was also crying.

“Baby, what’s wrong?” said Bean, touching her shoulder.

“Nothing,” she said. She wasn’t crying anymore.

“Don’t try to lie to me,” said Bean. “You were crying.”

“I’m so happy,” she said.

“You were thinking about how old little Ender will be when he dies.”

“That’s silly,” she said. “We’re going off in a starship until they find a cure. He’s going to live to be a hundred.”

“Petra,” said Bean.

“What. I’m not lying.”

“You’re crying because in your mind’s eye you can already see the death of your baby.”

She sat up and lifted the now-sleeping baby to her shoulder. “Bean, you really are bad at guessing things like this. I was crying because I thought of you as a little baby, and how you didn’t have a father to go and get you when you cried in the night, and you didn’t have a mother to hold you and feed you from her own body, and you had no experience of love.”

“But when I finally found out what it was, I got more of it than any man could hope for.”

“Damn right,” said Petra. “And don’t you forget it.”

She got up and took the baby back to the bassinet.

And tears came to Bean’s eyes. Not pity for himself as a baby. But remembering Sister Carlotta, who had become his mother and stayed with him long before he learned what love was and was able to give any back to her. And some of his tears were also for Poke, the friend who took him in when he was in the last stages of death by malnutrition in Rotterdam.

Petra, don’t you know how short life is, even when you don’t have some disease like Anton’s Key? So many people prematurely in their graves, and some of them I put there. Don’t cry for me. Cry for my brothers who were disposed of by Volescu as he destroyed evidence of his crimes. Cry for all the children that no one ever loved.

Bean thought he was being subtle, turning his head so Petra couldn’t see his tears when she came back to bed. Whether she saw or not, she snuggled close to him and held him.

How could he tell this woman who had always been so good to him and loved him more than he knew how to return—how could he tell her that he had lied to her? He didn’t believe that there would ever be a cure for Anton’s Key.