"This does not change anything about how I work," she said. "I am still your engineer. I am still all in on this ship and this crew. That does not have an off switch."

"I know that too," he said.

She stood up and he stood up and the small space of his quarters had a quality to it that was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable but simply honest, two people who had said real things to each other and were standing in the aftermath of that with their professional relationship intact and something personal sitting quietly between them that both of them understood was going to stay where it was for now.

"Thank you," she said, which was not something she had planned to say and which came out meaning several things at once.

He looked at her. "For what."

"For not making it complicated," she said.

"You did the work," he said. "I just listened."

She nodded and went to the door and paused with her hand on the frame the way she had been pausing at doors this week, the habit of someone who always had one more thing.

"The plasma injector timing," she said. "The new core flagged it this morning. Point three degrees of adjustment will bring the core efficiency up to ninety seven percent. I will take care of it tomorrow."

He looked at her for a moment. "Okay," he said, and this time the word was warm in a way that covered more than plasma injector timing and both of them knew it.

She walked out into the corridor and let the door close behind her and stood there for a moment in the quiet of Deck 2 and thought that she had done the right thing and that it had cost her something and that both of those things were true simultaneously and that she was going to have to learn to hold them both without making either one of them into something it was not.

She went to find Lindsy.

---

The astrometrics alcove was lit the way it always was, soft and focused, the star charts turning slowly above the projector. Lindsy was on the bench rather than the mat, PADD in hand, and she looked up when Mei-Lin came through the door and set the PADD down without being asked.

Mei-Lin sat on the bench beside the mat and looked at the charts for a moment. "I talked to Zedd," she said.

Lindsy waited.

"I told him I want to keep things professional." She looked at her hands. "That I cannot be both things at once right now and that the professional one has to come first."

Lindsy was quiet for a moment. "How did he take it."

"Well," Mei-Lin said. "He is that kind of person." She paused. "It was harder to say than I expected. Which I think means it was the right thing to say."

Lindsy looked at her with an expression that was more present than her usual composure, something careful and attentive underneath it. "How are you."

"Fine," Mei-Lin said. Then, more honestly, "I will be fine. It is the right call and I know it is the right call and knowing it is the right call does not make it not cost anything."

"No," Lindsy said quietly. "It does not."

Mei-Lin looked at her. There was something in Lindsy's expression that she read without examining too directly, the particular quality of someone who had just received information that landed somewhere specific. She thought about what it might mean and filed it and did not push on it because it was not hers to push on.

"I just needed to tell someone," she said.

"I know," Lindsy said. "I am glad you came here."

They sat together for a while after that with the star charts turning above them and the ship humming around them and neither of them said very much and neither of them needed to and when Mei-Lin finally stood to go back to her quarters she felt lighter than she had when she knocked on Zedd's door and thought that was probably what honest things did when you finally said them out loud.

Lindsy watched her go and sat in the alcove for a long time after the door closed and looked at the star charts and thought about several things.....