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"Doctor Grace? Ryland Grace?"
"That's me," Grace said distractedly, marking another answer wrong on Christina L.'s weekly quiz. Clearly he wasn't explaining heat transfer well enough, if half the kids were getting it wrong. He'd have to come up with a better demonstration for next year. "Can I help you?"
The voice on the other end of the phone was gentle, apologetic. "This is Claire with Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Corvallis. I'm calling about your father, James Grace, since I understand you're his next of kin—"
"Yeah," Grace managed, remarkably steady even as his heartbeat kicked into a panicked high-gear. He couldn't even really process the anxiety; all he felt was a sinking certainty and the beginnings of grief. "Yeah, my mom passed a few months ago."
"I'm so sorry to hear that. Well, I'm calling because… your father had a stroke last night. He was found by a neighbor. You're authorized to make medical decisions if he isn't capable, so…"
"Okay." Grace set down his pen and pushed the stack of quizzes aside. Might as well give them all As, as a freebie. "I'll… give me a day to request family medical leave, and I'll be there tomorrow night. Thank you for calling me."
"I'm sorry for your loss, Doctor Grace."
Grace had sort of assumed he'd never have to unpack it. He'd go back into the coma, he'd reach earth, and then he'd throw himself into Taumeba breeding and star-saving and missing Rocky and whatever else the savior of earth was supposed to do, and he just… wouldn't have time to think about it. Maybe, years down the line, he'd find a very expensive therapist (because surely being savior of earth must come with some sort of monetary reward) and start poking at those old wounds, but if he was lucky, he'd die before that became necessary.
Then he had discovered the leak and made the hardest, bravest decision he had ever made, and now he was hurtling back through space towards where he'd left Rocky, distressingly awake and distinctly lacking in any sort of psychiatric guidance. And he had a whole lot of time in which to do nothing but think.
Maybe, Grace often thought to himself on particularly bad days, the timing had been for the best after all. The losses had happened in such quick succession that he'd barely had time to start grieving his mom before the second blow of his dad's death had hit him, and then only a few months later the revelation about the dimming sun, and all those things one after another seemed to have broken something within him—some fundamentally human aspect of him, the part that could feel grief and remorse and really anything at all beyond a sort of existential exhaustion. He wanted to save the earth for his students' sake, but for himself? He just felt numb.
He hadn't wanted to look through the photos included in his bag of personal effects when he first came to. It felt eerie and uncomfortable, sifting through a life that was and wasn't his, looking into the smiling faces of people he must have known and loved but couldn't remember. Now, since he was almost certainly going to die alone in space as the price of saving Rocky, he figured he might as well tie up all the loose ends.
He still didn't recognize most of the people in the pictures—colleagues, he assumed, or university friends. A decent number were of him and various preteens on what looked like field trips or science fairs. A few were of his parents.
Those, he lingered the longest over. His memories of childhood were slower to return than things immediately relevant to the mission; Grace couldn't have said whether his childhood was good, or difficult, or lonely. He could have hated his parents as a teen and only made up with them during his mom's illness, for all he knew. Maybe he'd only had a few amicable months with his dad before the stroke.
It didn't matter. He had loved them, at some point or several points, and their deaths had destroyed him long before Stratt turned his brain to mush. Without that mental reset, he wasn't sure he would have ever gotten around to processing it.
"You have no immediate family; you don't even have a dog," Stratt said, and something in Grace snapped, a spreading crack through the icy calm numbing all of his emotions these days.
He stood abruptly. "How dare you."
"Doctor Grace, I am only saying—"
"You know how long ago they died. I know you know everything about me. God, I can't believe you'd stoop so low. No, actually, I can. You and your launch schedule can go to heck, Stratt."
It didn't change anything in the end, except make him angry enough to threaten sabotage and force Stratt to rob even his memories of his parents from him. Maybe that was kinder than letting him grieve, but it sure didn't feel that way.
One of the photos, towards the very bottom of the stack, felt different than the others. Printed on photo paper with a regular laserjet printer, Grace realized, judging by the striations in the image where the printer had been unable to cope with the saturation of the original.
It was a photo of him, taken shortly before he'd been drugged and memory-wiped: laughing, paper coffee cup clutched in one hand, Dubois beside him with a shit-eating grin on his face. Halfway out of frame, features blurred as she turned away from the camera, Stratt was grimacing in a poor attempt to hide her own laughter.
This was a rare photo, though Grace couldn't say exactly how he knew that. Eva Stratt had never posed for a photo in all the time he'd known her. Most likely this was the only one in existence containing the two of them in the same shot.
He turned the photo over to place it on the stack with the rest of the ones he'd already flipped through and paused, gaze caught on the neat cursive handwriting on the back.
He hated when Stratt was right.
I'm not sorry I sent you. I am sorry for what I said. Your parents would have been very proud of you, as am I.
—E.S.