Lindsy stayed in the alcove after Mei-Lin left and did not move for a long time.

The star charts turned above the projector the way they always did and the mug on the table had gone cold and she was not looking at either of those things. She was looking at the middle distance with the particular quality of attention she brought to problems that had not resolved themselves yet and thinking about what Mei-Lin had just told her.

Professional.

She turned the word over in her mind and looked at it from several angles the way she looked at navigational data that was not telling her everything it knew yet. Mei-Lin had made a clear and honest decision and had delivered it to Zedd directly and with integrity and had come here afterward to tell Lindsy about it because that was who Mei-Lin was and it was one of the things Lindsy valued most about her.

Professional.

She thought about day two. The cantina. The laugh that was short and genuine and not performed for anyone. The three point eight percent. The ten days since in which she had been methodical and composed and had folded something up carefully and put it in a drawer and kept it there because the drawer was the right place for it while the situation was what it was.

The situation had just changed.

She sat with that for exactly long enough to be sure she was not reacting and then she stood up.

She did not go to her quarters. She did not brush her hair or find shoes or change into something more considered than the soft flowing cream clothes she was wearing, loose and warm with the gold detailing at the belt and the cuffs that she wore on evenings when the ship was quiet and she was only being herself. She looked down at her bare feet on the mat and thought that bare feet were honest and she was going to be honest tonight and went out of the alcove before the thinking caught back up with the decision.

The turbolift was quick. Deck 2 was quiet. The corridor was on evening lighting, low and amber and warm, and she walked down it with the particular quality of someone who had plotted the course and committed to it and was not revising it now that it was in motion.

She stopped outside the captain's quarters.

She had walked past this door every day for ten days on her way to and from the bridge and had looked at it and kept walking and tonight she was not going to keep walking and the simplicity of that was its own kind of clarity.

She tapped the chime.

The door opened almost immediately and Zedd was there in the plain dark shirt that was never quite fully buttoned and cargo pants with an easy expression that shifted the moment he saw her standing in his doorway in her bare feet and her loose cream clothes with her hair down and her hand coming to rest gently against his chest before either of them had said anything about it, and she looked up at him with the expression she had stopped managing the moment she walked out of the alcove.

He looked at her for a moment that was just long enough.

"Lindsy," he said.

"I know what time it is," she said. "I am not here about the ship."

Something in his expression settled into a quality she recognized from the decontamination chamber and the hull and every quiet moment in between where neither of them had moved toward the thing that was there, the particular quality of someone who had been waiting to stop waiting and had just been given permission.

He stepped back from the door.

She went in.

His quarters were warm and dim and the viewport above the low leather seating area showed New Ferenginar turning below in long slow smears of green and gold and there was a glass on the low table with something dark in it barely touched and a candle burning on the surface beside it throwing warm light across the dark floor and it was a very good room to be standing in and she had been outside it for ten days.

She stood in the middle of it and looked at him and did not sit down.

"I have been keeping something in a place since day two," she said. "I kept it there because it was the right thing to do. The situation required it and I respected that." She looked at him steadily. "The situation has changed."

He held her gaze. "I heard," he said, which meant Mei-Lin had not been the only one processing this evening and she noted that and filed it as one more piece of information that confirmed the calculation she had been running since she walked out of the alcove.