Oh, shit. “Great,” I said, with forced cheerfulness, making a mental inventory of my responsibilities dirtside. “Give me a minute or two, I’ll pack up. I miss space, too.”
She shook her head, and anger blazed in her utterly scrutable hazel eyes. “No. I’m going back to who I was, before I met you.”
It hurt, bad. I had loved the old, steeplechase Zed, had loved her fun and mischief. The Zed she’d become after we wed was terrible and terrifying, but I’d stuck with her out of respect for the person she’d been.
Now she was off to restore herself from a backup made before she met me. She was going to lop 18 months out of her life, start over again, revert to a saved version.
Hurt? It ached like a motherfucker.
I went back to the station a month later, and saw her jamming in the sphere with a guy who had three extra sets of arms depending from his hips. He scuttled around the sphere while she played a jig on the piano, and when her silver eyes lit on me, there wasn’t a shred of recognition in them. She’d never met me.
I died some, too, putting the incident out of my head and sojourning to Disney World, there to reinvent myself with a new group of friends, a new career, a new life. I never spoke of Zed again—especially not to Lil, who hardly needed me to pollute her with remembrances of my crazy exes.
If I was nuts, it wasn’t the kind of spectacular nuts that Zed had gone. It was a slow, seething, ugly nuts that had me alienating my friends, sabotaging my enemies, driving my girlfriend into my best friend’s arms.
I decided that I would see a doctor, just as soon as we’d run the rehab past the ad-hoc’s general meeting. I had to get my priorities straight.