Not hearing from her husband wasn’t exactly out of the norm, but hearing nothing from him for an entire business trip didn’t fall into the realm of the expected.

The professional side of her trip had been much more standard.

Only one of her astronauts had been suffering from severe psychological problems. The others had been replete with the normal array of muscle and bone degeneration, sleep cycle distortion, and general perspective change. The troubled space traveler had responded very well to MDMA therapy and seemed primed to return to normal duties on track with his colleagues.

It was her habit to find her husband as soon as she got back in town.

When she first began the exercise, there had been a conscious element in her reasoning that knew she might catch her husband at some dalliance. In the 10 years that they had spent together, she had never walked in on her husband with another woman. Only once had she walked in on him with another person—a graduate student who had decided soon after that he couldn’t work with the famously laconic Dr. Peraster.

Everyone in the business knew that psychologists suffer from anxiety and all of the typical human responses to uncertainty or trial. She was bubbling with nerves, but coping in one of the dozen ways she knew how. Knowing that she was biased to sideline her own feelings, a consequence of her professional detachment, Anna had tried to imagine how she would respond to the state of her beloved. If he were on the mend, she would be encouraging, hopeful, and secretly proud. If the status quo were unchanged, and her husband was still in a state of introverted stasis, then there were more steps that she could take. If he were worse…

This is where her ‘what-if’ logic broke down. Questro was unquestionably brilliant, and as such his despair could be so deeply rooted as to make her worst-case scenario seem like a camping trip in the woods. Her work brought her into contact with some of the most brilliant minds in the country, so she knew very well that the brighter the flame, the worse the burn. Somewhere along with that thought came the realization that her best-case scenario should be covered by the same logic.

She wasn’t just anxious, the word did not cover the scope of her concern as she parked in the visitor’s lot outside her husband’s building. Dr. Mitchell’s company, in what Questro called, “a bald-faced attempt to apologize for exploiting my ideas”, had donated the research lab. It housed the most expensive and expansive instruments on several continents. Questro loved pointing out that it had saved the company tens of millions in taxes despite costing only millions.

She didn’t notice that the parking lot held more cars than usual until she looked at it from the stairwell that led to Q’s office. That was after she had noticed the new bulletin board covered in room assignments and four new thick papers hanging proudly from push pins. There was something going on.

At the top of the stairs she took a few deep breaths. This was it. Her husband, her partner, her love was in the first office on the right of the stairs. They had offered him the entire first floor, but he had always told her the first floor was for fatties. What a thing to remember? All right, Annagail, she thought, get a grip on yourself. It’s only been two weeks, what could have happened?

That might have been a poor choice of words… the office door was closed. A chair with an inbox sat to the left of the door, full. To the right a line of people waited, shuffling and reviewing papers with excited energy. What is this?

She ignored the gentlemen who politely requested that she move to the back of the line, but she couldn’t ignore the angry Asian woman at the front of the line who turned around to face her while directly blocking the office door. “Excuse me ma’am, Dr. Peraster’s collaborators have a strict first-come-first-serve agreement about face time with the doc-“ her voice broke for a moment, “your husband.” That got the entire hallway’s attention, suddenly the rustling was silent.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Clorence-Peraster, but do you mind waiting until Tom and Miron are done with their meeting? They only have a few more minutes.”

“Of course not Willow, and, you know I’ve told you before, call me Annagail. My husband always spoke highly of the three of you and if it is really important, I can wait.”

“I’m grateful Annagail. It’s been a roller coaster like nothing I have ever lived. The university funded over a hundred thousand dollars in grants for my projects and accepted me to proposal rounds that grant another ten million, and I don’t think I am winning the money game. Tom managed to get the first paper out, but only by a few hours.” Willow barked it all out in such a rush that Anna surmised she must have been tapping a little too heavily into the coffee pot. “Dr. Questro mentioned that you might be coming to the office today. I think he wants to show you the new lab set-up.”

“What is the new set-up, Willow?”

She looked at me for a moment, and, if her eyes were any judge, she put the brakes on whatever mental processes had been careening through her. “I… pardon me, but I don’t think that I can tell you. I’m not the originator of the idea.” She looked as though she wanted to burst. “He told us that it might be difficult to use the collaboration agreement; I guess this is what he meant.”

Willow was wearing a pained look on her overwrought, exhausted face. Schooling her own features back to repose should help convince the young woman that her actions were not causing Anna any trouble. The trouble was Anna’s body wasn’t listening to her mind the way it normally did. There was something foundation-shifting going on here, and she knew that somehow Q was at the center of it. Her subconscious was trying to remind her about something that the girl had said but she was too frantic for the memory to arrive in recall.

Perhaps her mental battle was apparent, because Willow turned back to her paper and her eyes began to scan the page with alarming speed. About a minute later the door opened and two students that she recognized walked smiling from the office where her husband was visible turned towards his workstation.

As she walked into the room she couldn’t take her eyes off of the man she knew better than any other. Normally she relied on his eyes to access the diagnostics on his soul, but today, the vigor that she had grown to love and had feared lost was evidenced in his fingers. “Just sit down, this will only take a moment.” His face showed evidence of recent sun exposure. His sleeves were pushed back to his elbows and his arms had gotten shades darker, the light layer of hair was beginning to show signs of blondeness. Could I type that fast? She didn’t know.

****

Tom and Miron’s idea for a micro-attractor surface array is one the people at Venturi Industries needed to hear about. His connections at the company were such that his technical emails would be read by someone with pull soon. The captain had given him his personal email, but had insisted that it not be used for non-sports matters. Questro didn’t mind not sending it there, it was important to keep the pure things in one’s life pure, especially when life could get as messy and his and Callisto’s could.

He looked up and saw his wife; his thoughts slammed to a stop.

How long had it taken him to finish the email after the door opened? That was how long his wife had been waiting for him. She was sitting demurely in one of the new comfortable chairs that had been arrayed around the office. He had always thought of his office as exceptionally large, but during the first full collaborator’s meeting, he had realized that it would be too small, and soon.

Somehow the present-ness of Annagail hadn’t fully settled on his mind. So he turned it off, and just became aware of her.

Her hands were folded on his favorite pair of jeans. She had more braids than he remembered, and they had been pulled into two groups that fell in irregularly matching columns on either side of her neck. His desk was blocking most of her lower body, but one of her legs was visible perched above the other. Did she shiver a little as his eyes touched her face? Or had it been he as the smell of her perfume reached his nostrils?

“Hi AG.”

“Hey Q.”

“I missed you terribly while you were away. How was your trip?”

“NASA scrambled most of the data, but the astronauts had exceptional memories: mostly run-of-the-mill stuff. I got a call from Dr. Venturi as I was leaving Cape.”

“What about? I just sent a proposal to VI for Tom and Miron. That’s the email I was sending. They finally teamed up to compete with Willow. It’s good for her.”

“He wants me to go to New York today to check out a case of selective amnesia that one of his vessels picked up. Seemed like a good opportunity, I really want to take it.”

“You should. What would stop you?”

“You.”

Silence. Questro stretched his arms up over his head and released a sound somewhere between a yawn and a growl. He stood up and walked around his desk to his wife and sat down in a chair next to her. He spun her chair around to face him and took her hands in his.

“Anna, I know what you did when you left and I don’t know how I could love you more. If you need to leave again so soon, I will drive you to the airport and kiss you on your way. But if you have the time, I would love to show you around the lab and show you how strongly you can motivate me. I opened all of my research to my graduates on the Potthast Valuestream and let them do all the thinking. All that I have been able to do for the past two weeks is think of you and how-”

Questro hadn’t realized that his hands had been shaking. When his wife pulled her mouth away from his, he knew only that the shaking had stopped. When his eyes opened again he pulled her onto his lap and proceeded to lose track of the time, his name, what he had eaten for lunch, and the time-zone that they were in. She let loose a satisfied little sound and rested her head on his shoulder, with her mouth inches from his left ear.

“I missed you too, love. If you want, I can tell that rich bastard to go to hell with his mystery man. Do you want to go on vacation? We could go to the cabin on Lake Porter and race each other to the island… why are you laughing at me Q? Don’t you want to go?”

“Love, I would follow you to the Pit of Doom and Fires of Mordor.” He laughed again, “I am laughing because you are happy, and so I am happy.” He turned his brain back on for a moment. “I think a vacation would do me good. My brain can only take so much input before it starts to misfire, and it would be good for the Triumvirate to get some management experience, but how about we go to New York and make Callisto pay for the Ritz-Carlton.”

That elicited a small chuckle and a smaller smack from the divine creature on his lap. “Of course I have time to see the lab, especially if you are coming with me to the city. It seems like there have been some foundation shifts in this place. Do you remember the only other time I came back from a trip and found someone in your office?”

“Oh that poor kid was putting too much pressure on himself… rather like someone else I know. Wait. I have to stand up to show you the lab, and then you will no longer be in this delicious proximity to me.”

“I assume that your go bag is packed.” He nods. “Then the quicker we get this tour done the quicker we get into the decadent proximity of a hotel room…”