Manón filled Jeanne’s glass and then Reyes’s and set the bottle on the table. “Are you ready to order?”
His ex-wife’s glare told him all he needed to know. “Give us a minute,” he said. Manón gave a small nod and stepped away to attend the seating of more dinner patrons.
“Diego,” Jeanne said, “you and I both know we don’t want to eat together. So do us both a favor and get to the point.”
Words caught in his throat. Much of the bitterness of their divorce had stemmed from the fact that he hadn’t wanted it. Ending their marriage had been Jeanne’s idea, and he had fought against it. Even though he had known it was likely for the best, letting go of their shared life had been excruciating for him. For his own emotional self-preservation he had given free rein to his resentment of her, but deep down part of him really did just want to sit here tonight and have dinner with her, for old times’ sake. I’ll be damned if I tell her that, though.
“You just did,” she said under her breath, and as soon as the words registered in his ears, he realized that they both were blushing, him for shame at being found out, her for knowing that his torch for her still smoldered, however weakly. She closed her menu and put it down on the table. “Just ask me to sign the protectorate agreement so I can refuse and get out of here.”
Abruptly, the music from the stage faltered, the piano going silent first and the other instruments rapidly falling away after it. Reyes looked up as T’Prynn walked away from the piano without a word to anyone and marched out the door. What the hell was that about? Resolving to follow up with the intelligence officer later, he looked back at Jeanne.
“I won’t ask you to sign the treaty,” he said, calmly setting aside his own menu. “You made it clear the colonists don’t want it, and I won’t ask you to betray their trust.”
She eyed him with a confused expression—a rare look for her, in his experience. “Then what is it you want?”
“Don’t go to Gamma Tauri,” he said, purging his mind of all words and images, leaving only his focused, sincere concern for her well-being. “When the Terra Courser ships out, stay here.”
Jeanne’s mood altered in response. The suspicion was gone, replaced by a genuine acceptance of what he was saying. “Why?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said, continuing to focus on imparting the verity of his words. “Not even vaguely. But you know I won’t lie to you, I never have…. Don’t go.”
Fear softened the resolve in her eyes, but she shook her head. “I want to believe you, Diego,” she said. “But how can I when you won’t tell me why? I know you never lied to me, but I know you’ve kept things from me, too.”
“Never anything that would hurt you,” he said. “Only what I had to, for the uniform.”
A cold and bitter glare returned to her gaze. “So you always said. But how could I ever know, Diego?”
“If you don’t know that about me,” he said, “then I guess we were never really married.”
Stung by his words, she got up from her chair. “You want to know why I divorced you?” She flung her napkin into his lap. “It wasn’t ’cause I stopped loving you. It was ’cause I realized you loved your secrets more than you loved me.” She started to leave, then turned back. “I’m touched that you care enough to try to save me, Diego, but I’m hurt that you don’t care enough to tell me the truth.”
“It’s not that simple, Jeanne.”
“Sometimes it is.”
He sat stunned as she turned and walked away, carrying herself with pride and power between the clustered tables and out the front door, into the faux twilight of the station’s massive terrestrial enclosure.
Alone at his table, Reyes picked up his wine. He took a sip, then looked across the table and noticed that Jeanne had not picked up either her water or her wine. As Manón returned, he handed her the napkin that Jeanne had hurled at him.
Manón asked, “Dining alone this evening, Commodore?”
He frowned. “Why should tonight be any different?” The hostess offered a comforting smile and reached out to start clearing away the table’s second place setting. “Wait,” Reyes said, feeling the word burst from his mouth before he could stop it. I’m tired of living like a prisoner on my own station, he decided. Jeanne was right. I keep too many secrets. Maybe it’s time to let one of them out into the light. “Do me a favor?” he said to Manón. “Contact the station’s JAG office and see if Captain Desai is available to join me for dinner.”
Raising a curious, slender eyebrow at the commodore’s request, Manón inquired, “Shall I tell the captain this is a professional summons?”
“No,” Reyes said. “Definitely not. Just tell her…it’s my turn to buy dinner.”
T’Prynn poured herself into the music, felt her troubled mind release itself in a flood tide of notes and chords, heard the song flow from the piano and force the hungry ghost of Sten’s katra deeper into her mind for just a few minutes.
Opportunities to play had been scarce of late. Her duties had become all-consuming since the Endeavour’s mission to Erilon. Lacking the regular outlet of playing the piano to ease her agitated thoughts, she had become profoundly tense and withdrawn in recent weeks. Adding to her stress was Sandesjo’s increasingly ardent attachment to her.
I see the hunger in your eyes when you come to me at night, Sandesjo had said, her words pointed with accusation. There had been no denying her observation; T’Prynn had known it was true. It was the honesty of it that most gave her pause. The first night she had ravished Sandesjo, the first time she had fed the fires of her tortured katra with the pleasures of the other woman’s flesh, she had lied to herself; she had blamed Sten’s katra for goading her, for pushing her to indulge her appetites as part of his campaign to undermine her psychic defenses. She had told herself the lie again, after the second and third nights she spent in Sandesjo’s arms. But when she had continued to return to her from then on, she had known without a doubt that it was her own doing and not Sten’s. Sandesjo’s voice still haunted her: You burn for me just as I burn for you.
Music was T’Prynn’s solace, her sacrament, her salve. It gave voice to her conflicted states, her surging passions, her darkening moods and fiery rages. As her fingers moved with fluid precision across the black and white keys of the piano, the resulting music gave her thoughts order and clarity, focus and tranquility…but only in fleeting doses too soon lost.
A rare break in her schedule had afforded her an hour to play tonight in Manón’s, and she had taken advantage of it without hesitation. The scheduled quartet’s regular piano player had graciously permitted her to sit in for the first set, and she had paid for his dinner as an expression of her gratitude.
From time to time she stole glances at the crowd, not to gauge their reactions to her music but just to remain aware of her surroundings; her profession demanded that she be ever attentive and take no detail for granted. Most of the patrons tonight were civilians. A fair number of station personnel filled in the gaps at the bar. The nondescript nature of tonight’s audience made the VIP guest seated close to the stage all the more notable: Commodore Reyes. As T’Prynn neared the end of the slow-tempo Paul Tillotson classic “Chartreuse,” she noted the arrival of the commodore’s former wife, Jeanne Vinueza. The human woman’s body language as Reyes greeted her suggested that she was not in a receptive or trusting frame of mind.