“It’s just…the other day…” Again he looked away, clearly struggling to deal with something. “No, not really,” he said at last. “I just want to get away.”

“Okay,” she said, not wanting to add to his troubles by pressuring him to discuss them. If he wanted to talk with her about it, then she would let him find the way to do so.

“I guess I wanted to say goodbye to you before I left,” he said then, seeming to recover from whatever had occupied him. He shook more salt into his mug and took another hearty drink. “We’ll be gone for three months.”

“I know,” she said. “You just make sure that you come back.” She immediately regretted her words, knowing that it evoked the disappearances of Ben and Jake.

“I’ll be back,” Nog promised, and Kasidy wondered how many such assurances she would hear in her life, and whether any of them would ever turn out to be justified. Nog set his mug back down on the tray—rather deliberately, she thought—and then locked his eyes with hers. “I also wanted to tell you that Jake’s coming back too.”

“What?” The assertion shocked her, too much for her even to be happy about the claim. She put her own cup back down on the tray, a little too quickly, and tea spilled over the rim and onto her fingers. She ignored it. “Nog, what do you mean?”

“I mean that I know Jake is all right,” he said confidently. “That he’s alive and not hurt or anything.”

“Howdo you know that?”

“I don’t know how I know,” he admitted. “I just do.”

“So you don’t know,”she said, trying to control the annoyance she felt and prevent it from growing into anger. She raised her hand to her lips and mechanically licked the drips of tea from them. “You just believehe’s okay.”

“Listen,” Nog insisted, leaning toward her in his chair, “people keep talking about Jake being missing or in trouble because he would never just leave the station and not tell anybody where he was going.”

“He did tell us,” Kasidy pointed out. “He said he was going to visit his grandfather on Earth.”

“Right,” Nog said. “But I don’t think he was ever going there.”

“Why not?” she asked. “Did Jake say something to you?”

“No, no,” he said. “I would have told you—I would have told everybody—if he did. But before he left, I kind of got the feeling that maybe he wasn’t going to Earth after all.”

“But why did you get that feeling?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t remember, exactly,” Nog said. “But I do remember the feeling. It was the last time Jake and I talked before he left, and it seemed to me like he wasn’t going to Earth, and that he was specifically trying notto tell me that.”

“But why wouldn’t Jake tell you where he was going or what he was doing?” she asked, of both Nog and herself. “Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“I don’t know,” Nog said. “But you know Jake. If he thought there was any chance he wasn’t coming back, he would’ve said goodbye.”

“Yes,” Kasidy agreed hesitantly. She looked away from Nog and toward the window, trying to make sense of what he was saying, wantingto make sense of it.

“I don’t know why Jake didn’t want us to know where he was going,” Nog said, “but he’s smart and strong—”

“Like his father,” Kasidy said without thinking.

“Exactly,” Nog said. “I’m telling you, I knowhe’s coming back.” It was preposterous, of course. Nog had not presented any new facts, other than his recollection of having a feeling that Jake might not have been headed to Earth. But even if that turned out to have been an accurate feeling, it still remained that Jake had not been seen or heard from in two months.

And yet,Kasidy thought. Nog’s assertion that Jake would return, unsupported though it might be, for some reason bolstered her. In the vigor of Nog’s certainty, she found comfort, and even a renewed hope.

“You know,” he said, “Jake really likes you.” Kasidy looked back over at Nog. “I mean, he loves you, but he also likesyou. He thinks you’re great.” The words touched Kasidy deeply. “I’m telling you, he wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.” She nodded her agreement to him. Whether true or not, Nog’s conviction filled her with a feeling of strength she had been lacking for some time. She committed to herself that she would consciously hold on to that feeling for as long as she could.

They sat for a while in a comfortable silence. When she heard light taps at the window, Kasidy looked up. Small, clear droplets had started to collect on the glass. “It’s raining,” she said.

“Yeah,” Nog said. “Choritzing.”

“What?” The word meant nothing to her.

“Choritzing,”Nog repeated. “The Ferengi have a hundred seventy-eight words for rain. This—” He pointed toward the window. “—is choritzing.”

“Oh,” Kasidy said. “Okay.” They sat and watched as some of the drops grew heavy enough that gravity pulled them sliding down the window. “I like the rain,” she said.

“Me too,” Nog said. “It reminds me of home. Back on Ferenginar.” Kasidy looked over at him, and he suddenly smiled broadly at her. “So what are you going to name the baby?” he asked. Kasidy smiled back at him. This was a question Nog asked her with some regularity, the joke between them being that almost every time he asked, she gave him a different answer.

“Well,” she said, “if it’s a girl, Octavia Lynn.”

“Okay. Maybe a little too hew-mon,but okay,” he said, pleasantly teasing her. “And what if it’s Jake’s brother?”

“Half-brother,” she corrected.

“How can you have half a brother?” Nog asked.

“Ben is Jake’s father,” Kasidy explained, “and he’ll be the baby’s father—”

“Right,” Nog interrupted. “So they’ll be brothers.”

“But Jake and the baby will have different mothers,” she forged ahead, “so they’ll be half-brothers.”

“How can you have halfa brother?” Nog repeated, but she thought from the expression on his face that he was kidding her. “Hew-mons,”he said again, rolling his eyes, and they both laughed. When she finally told him her current choice for a boy’s name—Marcus Dax—he playfully suggested that Marcus Nog might be a better option.

They talked for a long time after that, about her solitary life on Bajor, and about his work on Defiant,and about Colonel Kira and Dr. Bashir and Quark and other people. They even spoke more about Jake, and also about Ben, in a way that she thought neither one of them had in a long time: without frustration or sadness, but with the simple joys of love and remembrance. They sipped at their tea and hot chocolate—Kasidy refilled their cups twice—and nibbled on the teacakes, which Nog also salted. When they finally rose from their chairs so that Kasidy could show Nog around the house, she thought that she felt stronger and more positive than she had in a very long time. And for his part, whatever had been troubling Nog when he had arrived seemed to have left him as well, as least for the time being.

As they were leaving the front room, Kasidy stopped and looked down at Nog. “Thank you for coming,” she said to him. He smiled up at her, and then she showed him the rest of the house that she and Ben and Jake had built.

14

Thirishar ch’Thane snapped the panel back into place and stood up. He bent over the console, touched a sequence of controls, and watched as the level-five diagnostic ran through its automated functions. Words and numbers flew across the display too rapidly to be read, and the testing sequence signaled its completion with a beep a moment later. A readout appeared on the screen, and Shar tapped a touchpad with a long, slender finger, scrolling through the list of system checks and verifying their outcomes. As with the previous four diagnostics he had executed today on the stellar cartography lab’s secondary interfaces, the results all showed green. But the information he most sought, the time required to run the diagnostic, appeared at the bottom of the list: two point three seconds.