CHAPTER 20
EVE
THE FOLLOWING NOVEMBER
Sasha is eighteen months old and running the household, by which I mean she can say “no,” “mine,” “dog,” “moon,” and “Da,” and she deploys all five with the strategic brilliance of her grandfather reading a contract.
“Moon” is her favorite. She says it at the actual moon, at pictures of the moon, at round light fixtures, at a tortilla once. We are working on precision. We are not getting it.
She is still small for her age and nobody mentions it anymore, because she outruns her brother and outargues her parents and the weight-check era has passed into legend, preserved in the log books like the early history of a nation.
Her cardiologist discharged her with a sticker.
She put the sticker on the dog next door.
Simon is eighteen months old and has never done anything at low volume.
He runs — flat out, arms windmilling, the giraffe dragging behind him like a very loved banner — and his current word count includes “more,” “up,” and, mysteriously, “invoice,” which he learned from Dana on speakerphone and which Dana has offered to pay for in therapy later.
They are people now. That’s the thing nobody could convey to me in the hard weeks, when they were tiny loud potatoes: they turn into people, fast, and every version of them evaporates behind you.
I have the log books to prove the potatoes existed.
I have Mason’s log too, matching mine, two parallel records of the same small country.
The foundation has eleven employees and a waiting list. Avery Earth Systems — the name still makes me stand a little straighter — has shipped thermal liners to forty neonatal transport units, shelter panels to three wildfire regions, and a field-hospital insulation kit that Fran Okafor tested by, and I quote, “leaving it in the desert for a week and then being mean to it.”
It passed.
My father’s work is all over the map now, in the literal sense, pinned under disaster zones and medevac routes, and every quarter I take the napkin down from the workbench and update it, a running tally on the back of the frame, in pencil.
Mason is founder and chairman of Tailor Aerospace, twenty-five hours a week, by contract, and the contract is holding because Adaeze enforces it with the warmth of a bailiff.
He still lights up about engines — God, does he light up, try him on lunar mass drivers at a dinner party, I dare you — but the light now shares a house with the rest of him.
He stacks boxes at Skybridge two Saturdays a month.
He knows which cup is Sasha’s. He knows Simon will not sleep without the giraffe and the fan.
He knows that the tired cry goes up and the hungry cry goes down, and last week he corrected a well-meaning aunt on the difference.
We live together now, mostly at the coast house, because the twins’ whole civilization is here and because it turns out I am unwilling to leave my father’s garage, and because Mason, asked where he wanted to live, said “Wherever the log books are,” which is the most romantic sentence of my entire marriage.
The year had its coda. Jessica Mort left Mort Dynamics in the spring — “by mutual agreement,” the announcement said, which everyone in the industry translated correctly.
The last thing she ever sent me wasn’t an apology, because she is who she is; it was silence, which from Jessica was the closest available thing. The self-help book is still on my father’s shelf between the engine manuals.
Rosa comes twice a week and refuses the title of anything, while functionally running a small nation.
Delia visits on her days off and the twins lose their minds.
Mike and Carol are down the road most Sundays, burning something, and Biscuit — whose real name turned out to be Kevin, a fact I learned at his Skybridge promotion ceremony and have been forbidden to use — taught Simon to tie a knot that Simon cannot untie, which is a whole new category of problem I now live with.
June discharged me in May with a certificate she made herself on a desktop printer, which says GRADUATED in clip-art stars, and which is taped inside my pantry door where the serious documents live.
And tomorrow, Tailor Aerospace flies again.
The lunar test is unmanned, an uncrewed heavy-lift flight, the first big hardware back on the pad since everything burned. Adaeze runs it. The mission director is a woman named Cole who answers questions with numbers.
The independent safety authority has signed off, and I know their sign-off means something, because they killed the first proposed launch window last month over a valve and nobody, not even the chairman, could change their minds.
Mason told me that with unconcealed delight. “They outrank me,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
The thermal protection on the vehicle is my father’s.
The new version, Avery System Nine, refined with foundation money and tested past every margin I could invent.
I licensed it to the mission myself, in January, at market terms, reviewed annually, through my own board, after Ruiz’s people spent six months trying to break it and sending me champagne when they couldn’t.
Mason didn’t know until the paperwork was final. I’d kept it quiet, and when he saw the vehicle spec sheet he came out to the garage where I was packing samples and stood in the doorway holding the page.
“This is System Nine,” he said. “You licensed Nine to Odyssey?”
“I licensed Nine to the mission,” I said. “There’s a difference. Ask Adaeze.”
“Eve.” He put the page down on my father’s workbench, carefully, napkin-carefully. “Are you sure? After everything — this program, me, all of it. Are you sure?”
And I said the honest thing, the one I’d been saving: “I trust the man involved with it now.”
He was quiet for a second. Then, gently, with the ghost of the old grin: “You know I’m not running the mission.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why.”
Launch morning is clear and cold, and sound carries for miles. The family observation area is a low hill of bleachers and heat lamps, a respectful distance from the pad.
The four of us arrive early because Mason, who has watched a hundred launches from the center of the storm, is vibrating with the novelty of being a spectator.
He has Sasha on his shoulders. I have Simon on my hip, giraffe secured, snacks staged, because our children experience countdowns primarily as opportunities to eat crackers.
Everyone is here. That’s what gets me, standing on the bleachers in the cold: the whole jury of my life, assembled voluntarily.
Rosa, wearing a Tailor cap she claims is ironic.
Mike and Carol, Carol with binoculars she’s using mostly to evaluate the crowd.
Ruiz, off the clock for once, holding coffee.
Fran and a Skybridge crew who drove hours because “the liner’s flying, we’re flying-adjacent, that’s the friendship.
” Dana, who has never attended a non-legal event in her life, standing straight with her hands folded, pretending she is here in an advisory capacity and failing.
Voss finds me during the hold and shakes my hand formally, like we’re concluding a case, which I suppose we are. “She flew clean through review,” he says, of the vehicle. “Your father’s going to the Moon, Ms. Tailor.”
“He’s been there,” I say. “He got there first, in 1998, at a table with a grease stain. This is just the physical delivery.”
Adaeze comes over during the hold at T-minus forty and squats to the twins’ level and says, “Your grandfather’s work is on that rocket,” and Sasha says “Moon,” with total authority, and Adaeze says, “Correct,” and goes back to run the world.
“She’s good,” Mason murmurs.
“She’s better than you.”
“Oh, miles better,” he says, with complete sincerity.
The count comes down. The bleachers go quiet. Simon stops chewing, mid-cracker, sensing the grown-ups’ attention spike. Sasha grabs two fistfuls of her father’s hair.
T-minus ten.
Nine.
My heart is doing the twin-engine thing, fear and faith running on parallel tracks.
I don’t pretend the old memory isn’t there.
It is there — it will always be there — the rotor wash, the orange smoke, my daughter’s face against my chest. But the memory doesn’t run the room anymore.
It sits in the bleachers with everything else: the bad table, the good books, the night flight, the folder, the chowder.
The whole jury. My life, all of it, watching together.
Six.
Five.
Mason reaches over without looking and takes Simon’s giraffe before it can be dropped over the rail, a save so practiced it qualifies as choreography, and I think: that’s it. A man who knows what his son is about to drop before his son does, because he has logged the hours.
Three.
Two.
Ignition.
The pad lights up, the sound arrives in the chest before the ears, and the rocket climbs off the ground on a column of fire wrapped in my father’s mathematics, straight and clean and true.
And Mason — I watch him, because I can’t not, because this is the test under the test — Mason turns his head away from the ascending rocket, away from the fire, away from everything, and looks at me.
He checks the bleachers before the sky. He finds me, and finds Sasha on his own shoulders by feel, and only then, only after he’s seen us, does he turn his face up to watch his dream go.
“Moon!” Sasha shouts, to scattered applause from the nearby bleachers.
Simon points. “MOON,” he bellows, mispronouncing nothing, inventing emphasis, his father’s son.
“Correct,” I say, and my voice is not steady, and I don’t care.
The rocket climbs. It does not break apart. It gets smaller and brighter and smaller still, riding a thermal skin that a man drew on a napkin at a family restaurant in 1998, while his daughter ate chicken fingers and believed in him.
“Okay,” Mason says softly, watching the sky now, one hand back to find mine. “Okay. There she goes.”
I take his hand. Simon drops his cracker. No one retrieves it. Some sacrifices are worth it.
Afterward there’s the slow, happy chaos of a crowd that watched something go right. Coffee and handshakes and Adaeze doing her press hit with a giant model of the vehicle behind her, and Carol already planning the lunch where we’ll all pretend this wasn’t emotional.
Mason carries a sleeping Sasha, out cold from the excitement, her “moon” sign finally quiet. Simon is on my hip, pointing at the bright fading point in the sky, narrating it for the giraffe.
We walk to the car slowly, all four of us, across the damp grass, in no hurry whatsoever, because there is nothing on the calendar today that outranks this. It’s a Tuesday, basically.
A Tuesday with a rocket in it.
Mason falls in beside me and bumps my shoulder with his, the little check-in that means here, present, accounted for.
“Next one,” he says, nodding at the sky. “Lunar orbit. Eighteen months, if the safety board allows it. When they’re three. They’ll actually remember it.”
“Then we’d better get the log books ready,” I say. “Bigger crayons.”
He laughs, and Simon laughs because his father is laughing, and Sasha sleeps on, dreaming whatever toddlers dream, and ahead of us the sun is all the way up over the hill, and the day is ours, and we walk to it together.
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Thank you for reading.