Stoan

Chapter Three

Chapter Three

HE SHOULD HAVE HAD more stuff. Reina pulled the last piece of Lex’s clothing out of the closet and boxed it up. Her eyes were bone dry and her hands didn’t shake. The counselor that her friend Oreylia had insisted she see said that grief could take time and it manifested in strange ways.

But it had been two weeks since she received the news. This wasn’t denial. Reina knew that Lex wasn’t coming back, that he was dead. She knew that his own ambition and stupidity had brought him to that place, floating dead in the cold blackness of space, discovered by chance because another pilot chose to set a course through a little traveled corridor.

It was three years of her life gone.

Three years of joy, sorrow, laughter, and tears. And pain. Mostly pain by the end. And then indifference. Lex was a good humored guy, or he had been. He was always working on his next scheme, always talking about a big break.

But for the last two years of their marriage, they’d been apart more than together. His job as a long haul freight pilot took him all over the system and to systems beyond. But Reina had never even been off planet. The worst part of it was that their relationship only flourished when he was away.

Two days after he landed back home, without fail, they’d be yelling and fighting and putting on a show for their friends, trying to hide all the fissures in the broken relationship. And Reina had had enough. The application for divorce was filled out on her computer. She’d only been waiting for Lex to get back home to inform him in person.

But something was broken within her. Even if the relationship was over, she knew she should be crying. That was what a widow did.

She’d cried when Haylio had been hurt and kidnapped. She’d cried when they tried to hurt her. She’d even cried over Haylio’s bed in the hospital, praying for him to get better. Now that Haylio was on the mend, Reina found she had no more tears to spend.

The truth was, she hadn’t cried because of someone’s death in more than ten years. Not since her parents were gunned down outside the Citadel in Droscus’s capital. But she didn’t dwell on that—there was a difference between grief and masochism.

Reina sealed the box and carried it out into the living room, practically tripping over her cat, Flig. He hissed at her and ran off to hide in one of the bedrooms. She could hear Haylio watching a vid in his room and smiled when he started making kissy noises at the cat.

The box joined its two companions, all three a little more than half filled with everything that Lex had left in the apartment. His clothes took up most of the space, but when it came to other personal belongings, the boxes were tellingly empty.

His ship had been his true home, this apartment merely a way-station.

“Is that really it?” Haylio asked, coming up behind her nearly silently and making her jump.

“How do you move like that?” she practically growled. He was five years older than her and built like an ox. They had the same blond hair and pale skin, but his face was made for laughter, grooves imprinting themselves on his skin.

He hadn’t always been so quick to smile. When she’d moved to Nina City, though it hadn’t yet been called that, thirteen years ago, he had been harsh, afraid to trust or smile. They’d both been creatures formed in the Citadel.

“I’ll never share my secrets, sis.” He kept his tone light, but not in the way their friends were doing. Outside of the apartment, everyone treated her like she was bound to break down at any moment. Other than Haylio, the only people who’d acted like she was an adult were Nina and Stoan.

And she refused to think about Stoan when she could control it. Her disturbingly vivid dreams didn’t count.

“Do you think we should send this off to his family?” she asked, waving towards one of the boxes. “They’ve put a claim on most of his personal effects from the ship.” And though it was her legal right to do so, she hadn’t disputed it. She didn’t need Lex’s stuff.

“You are doing alright, aren’t you?” he asked with just a little hesitation.

Reina groaned and threw herself on the overstuffed couch. “Keep asking me that and I’m going to call the doc and tell him you look a bit pale and sweaty.”

Haylio’s eyes widened and he took a step back, clutching his chest. He was pale, but not much more than usual, and while he was bruised and moving slowly, Reina thought he was making a swift recovery. Even if he’d been silent to her on what exactly was done to him.

Still, Haylio wasn’t deterred. “He was your husband.”

Reina sighed. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“You’re going to the counselor again, at least?” She opened her mouth to respond and he spit out more before she could say anything. “Say yes and I’ll change the subject.”

“Yes.” It wasn’t even a concession. The doctor was a gentle woman who hadn’t made Reina feel bad about what she was or wasn’t feeling. “Now go lay down or I will call the doc.”

Instead, Haylio took the seat beside her and kicked his feet up onto the faux-wooden table. He’d lost weight in the last few weeks while his body recovered and his skin still had that sickly, ashen pallor. “Are you going to tell me about that mysterious meeting you had before I got out of the med unit?”

“It wasn’t anything important.” And Haylio shouldn’t have known about it. He’d barely been conscious the day she went and she hadn’t breathed a word to anyone about where she was going or who she was meeting. Perhaps that was a stupid move for a woman whose parents had been murdered by palace guards, but she knew when to practice discretion. Besides, if she ended up dead, she didn’t want Haylio sacrificing his life in some misplaced act of vengeance.

“You’re a terrible liar.” He smiled, tilting his head towards her. She saw the hint of pain that he was keeping from her in his eyes. He probably hadn’t taken all the pain medication he’d been prescribed, either because he didn’t want to fall asleep or he didn’t like that it made him a bit loopy. She kept quiet about it, trusting that he wouldn’t let himself suffer too much.

“If I’m a terrible liar,” she countered, “Then you know I’m doing okay and you don’t need to worry.” Ha! Let him back himself out of that one.

Instead, a shadow fell over his eyes and he frowned. “If you say so. Just promise that you’ll come to me if things get too bad. If you need help.”

“It’s not like that.” She wasn’t really sure what it was like. Her orders for the moment were simply to live a normal life and wait for Stoan to call. She feared that when he did, everything would change.

But that was a problem for another day.