I put my hand on my stomach and the baby turned, once, as if to say she felt it too, the change in the air, the letting-go.

We landed after three hours, and there was a car waiting on the tarmac, and standing beside it in a dress uniform heavy with ribbon was General Ivo Brightwood — Niko’s uncle, the head of the command, a man I had known for a decade and loved for most of it.

It was Ivo who had introduced us, twelve years before, at a change-of-command ceremony I’d attended in a capacity I won’t describe.

Niko had been a captain then, younger, less careful, quicker to laugh, and he’d found me by the drinks table and said something that wasn’t a line but landed like one, and Ivo had watched the whole thing from across the room with the expression of a man who has just realized two of his favorite people are going to complicate his life.

He gave me away at the wedding, since my own father had spent that day sulking that the reception wasn’t grander.

He’d stood up in a small chapel and handed me toward his nephew and said, quiet, just for me, “You take care of each other.