Oh fuck. That was probably inevitable, but he hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. He turned around to hang the strap of his satchel from the back of his chair, slyly stealing a glance in the direction she’d been looking. There was a mustached guy in a blue polo who was glaring at them as he talked conspiratorially to his family. He looked like he’d done a few rounds of golf earlier in the day and even sported a beeper. Who the hell still uses a beeper?

He turned to her, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. “Don’t worry, I’ll fend him off if he starts anything.”

“Did something happen today?” she asked. “You seem pensive.”

“Oh.” Well, um, yes. What to say? He definitely couldn’t tell her about Nils, not now. She’d have to know eventually, but not now. “I’ve . . . Well, I’ve had an offer.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, it’s a pretty big one.”

“Is it . . . something you want to do?”

“No, not particularly. But it’s something I feel like I might have to do.”

“Does it mean . . . you’re going to have to travel?”

“Yeah, you might say that.”

He caught her expression, a look that skipped surprise and hurt and went straight to resignation. He clasped her hand on the table. “Hey, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean we’ll be separated.” And I mean that in the most nightmarish way possible.

“Can you tell me anything about the offer, or is it one of those NDA deals?”

He sucked on the inside of his lip, his instincts already spinning a believable half truth, or a lie of omission, but then he wondered, Why? Why keep Nikola’s proposal from her, especially after he’d demanded she stop keeping things from him? This wasn’t a burdensome cruelty on the level of her father blackmailing her by threatening to release her medical history. No, this was a completely different type of burdensome, and one he wasn’t doing himself any favors for enduring alone.

Fuck it.

He told her everything about Nikola’s pitch for a lifeboat for the human genome, a pitch that attached both of them as a condition. Cora took it in, and he saw in her the same Ping-Pong ball of thought, the wild imaginings that had banged through his own head several days earlier. The horror of the vacuum of space, the unimaginable cost of leaving everyone she’d ever known, the excitement of the idea of exploring alien worlds.

“How do you feel about the idea?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I guess the silver lining here is since we have five years at minimum before shit starts getting serious, we have some time to think it over. But—”