JOHANNA KEPLER
The last hour of the night went like that. I looked away first. I always looked away first, and I had never once decided to. He would give somebody’s remark the two seconds it deserved and then find me again across the room.
As the evening waned and the crowd thinned to murmurs and empty glasses, I lingered at a display table. My fingers traced the battered casing of my newly won Apollo 12 camera. The metal was cool beneath my touch—solid, unyielding. A smile got partway up and stopped. Every scratch. A story.
Then a voice behind me, smooth as brushed steel.
“That’s a great piece, Dr. Kepler.”
I stiffened, just slightly. Spine aligning before I could stop myself.
He stepped beside me, coffee in hand. “I was going to bid on it myself. But I saw how determined you were, so I let it go.”
That grin again. Infuriatingly effortless.
Every eye in the room found him.
Everyone but me.
He had put me next to him, where all of them were looking, and I didn’t hate it. He was still in the flight suit. Nobody else in that building could have gotten away with it and every person in that building knew it.
Damn him.
I turned, the camera cradled in my hands. Solid. Real. Earned, not gifted.
“You mean the one you clearly underestimated?” I held the camera up like a challenge. “Don’t tell me you were after the camera that opened Al Bean’s forehead up. Man survived the Moon and got taken out by his own equipment in the water.”
Farrall laughed, slow and easy, and shook his head, that infuriating grin intact. “Wasn’t my first choice, no. But yeah… I’ve got a soft spot for survivors.” He tipped his coffee toward the camera. “Guess I’ll have to settle for Plan A—while your Plan B’s got one hell of a story.”
“You’re assuming this was Plan B.” I flipped the camera in my hands, slow and deliberate, like weighing a verdict. My eyes found his and held. “Oh, I disagree. This little guy put an astronaut on the deck and lived to tell the tale.” I tapped the gouge in the casing. “Can your memoir say the same?”
His smirk edged higher. “Touché, Dr. Kepler. You’ve got an eye for survivors.”
My thumb moved once on the camera casing.
I tilted the casing so the gouge faced him. “Six stitches over his right eye. It broke off its mount at splashdown and found one of the two men aboard who had walked on the Moon.”
“And then he painted for thirty-odd years.” He nodded at the casing as if it could hear him. “Cut up his old mission patches and mixed them into the paint. Moon dust and all.”
I had not known that. I filed it to check later, and I already knew it would turn out to be true.
“You looked that up for tonight.”
“I looked it up when I was nine. The library had a poster of him on the Moon. I wanted to know what happened to him after.” He said it like a man reporting the temperature.
His smile—damn him, why? The all-American of all Americans. Like he’d just stepped off a recruitment poster. I needed a time out.
He nodded toward the coffee stand. “How about I buy the woman with the best story a coffee? Convince me that camera was worth every penny.”
I let him wait until the waiting showed on his face. Then I nodded, and let him see it land. “You’re on, Colonel. But I’m bringing the camera.” I lifted the battered relic between us like a witness. “It deserves to hear your version of events.”
He laughed. Warm, unguarded, real.
I fell into step beside him.