She and Honor’s father had taught their daughter that, almost without realizing they had. They’d done it by example and by loving her, without limit or qualification. They’d made her whole in all of the ways that mattered most, even while she was wounded in that one secret regard. The quiet place in her heart where she’d been supposed to keep the belief that anyone could truly love her… unless they had to.

It had been stupid, stupid, stupid, she told herself. If anyone in the entire galaxy could know that, then certainly with her parents and Nimitz she’d been that one person. But it hadn’t helped, and then, at the Academy, had come Pavel Young and Mr. Midshipman Carl Panokulous—the would-be rapist and the man who had hurt her more cruelly still. The damage they’d done had been terrible, yet she’d survived it. Survived and, with Paul Tankersley’s help, actually learned to heal. To know that there were people who could—and would—love her. She’d actually, physically felt the love of so many people in her life now, in so many ways. Paul. Her parents, James MacGuiness, Andreas Venizelos, Andrew LaFollet, Alistair McKeon, Jamie Candless, Scotty Tremaine, Miranda LaFollet, Nimitz…

Yet deep inside her, somewhere all the healing had failed to reach, there was the fear. No longer the fear that they would not love her, but that they would not be allowed to. That the universe would punish them if they dared to, for all too many of those who had loved her had also died because of it.

It wasn’t logical, and she knew it, but she’d lost too many lives, and every one of them had torn its own hole in her soul. Officers and ratings who had served with her and paid with their lives for her victories. Armsmen who had died so that their liege lady might live. Friends who had knowingly faced Death—and lost to him—for her sake. It had happened too often, cost too many too much, and the terror that anyone who dared to love her was marked for death mocked her, for logic was a weak weapon when matched against the unreasoning assurance of the heart. She’d made progress in her fight against that irrational certainty. She knew that, too. But if she’d won a few battles, she had yet to win the war, and the tangled weave of emotions and needs, fear and the obligations of honor, that wrapped about her feelings for Hamish Alexander like a shroud threatened to cost her even more ground in the fight.

“So,” Hamish said finally, his voice almost startling after their long, mutual silence, “did the two of you decide how we ought to tackle this?”

He kept his tone light, almost droll, but he didn’t fool anyone at the table, including himself, and Honor looked at Emily.

“I think we’ve found a way to at least start getting a handle on it,” his wife told him with a serenity Honor was half-surprised, even now, to realize was genuine. “I don’t say it will be easy, and I’m not sure it will be quite as effective, under the circumstances, as I would have liked—” she glanced sideways at Honor for a heartbeat “—but I believe we can at least blunt the worst of their attack.”