"Yes?" she said. "May I help you?"
"Are you Kai?" Zahara asked.
"Yes, that's right."
"My name's Zahara Cody. I worked with your husband aboard the Prison Barge Purge.'"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand." The woman stared at them nervously. "I already spoke to the Empire about this."
"We're not here as representatives of the Empire," Trig said.
The woman didn't say anything, but her look of wariness grew deeper.
"Your husband had something he meant to pass on to you," Zahara said. "I just wanted to make sure that you got it." Reaching into her pocket, she handed the woman a single tattered sheet of flimsi.
The children all gathered closer, craning their necks to watch as Kai opened it up. The smallest of them, too young to read, looked at up his mother. "What is it, Mommy?"
The woman didn't answer for a long time. Her eyes moved back and forth across the page, and Trig saw tears glimmering there, rising up and spilling over. Then she looked back up at Zahara.
"Thank you."
Zahara and Trig waited while she read it silently to herself a second time. By the time she finished, the tears were running down her checks. She didn't bother wiping them away, and the oldest child had slipped his arm around her, as if he could somehow protect her from her own sadness.
"Thank you for this," she said. "Would you. would you like to come inside? I was just making some tea."
"That sounds good," Zahara said, and she and Trig stepped inside to the clamor of children and the smell of tea.