Archive of Our Own

The first letter arrived early in the afternoon.

Amanda had not expected it.

She had hoped, perhaps, in the quiet and private way she had learned to hope for things where Spock was concerned—carefully, without pressure, the way one hopes for rain in a dry season without demanding it of the sky—but she had not expected it.

Sarek had said nothing on the shuttle home from the Enterprise, and she had said nothing either, because there are certain things a mother understands about her children that do not require discussion with anyone, including their fathers. She had watched Spock on that bridge. She had watched the way he stood and the way he moved and the way his eyes tracked across the room, and she had filed it all away in the part of herself she kept only for him.

So when the message came through, flagged with a Starfleet routing code and addressed in the precise, unornamented way Spock had of writing her name—Amanda Grayson, no flourish, no endearment, as though she were a colleague and not the woman who had read him Tennyson until he fell asleep—she set down her tea and sat with it for a moment before she opened it.

It was not a long letter. She did not expect a long letter.

Mother,

I am writing to inform you that the Enterprise has departed Vulcan space on schedule and is en route to Starbase 12 for a routine resupply. Our estimated arrival is in six point three days, barring navigational complications, which I do not anticipate.

I trust your journey home was without incident.

I find that I have additional thoughts regarding our conversations during your visit which I did not express at the time, as the occasion did not seem appropriate. I will endeavor to articulate them at a later date. For now, I wished only to indicate that your visit was—acceptable. More than acceptable.

Live long and prosper.

Spock

She read it twice. Then she read it a third time, slowly, lingering on the words "more than acceptable" the way one might linger over a gift given awkwardly, with the giver's eyes averted.

Spock had not looked at her when they said goodbye.

He had stood very straight on the transporter pad and given her the ta'al and she had, with great restraint, given it back instead of doing what she wanted to do, which was to take his face in her hands the way she had when he was small and tell him she loved him in all the ways she knew how.

She wrote back that same evening.

The second letter came three weeks later, and it was longer—even if not by much.

It was not as though Spock suddenly discovered an enthusiasm for correspondence that he had been hiding from her for thirty years. It was longer in the way that a door, once opened a crack, allows a little more light through than it did before.

He told her about the resupply at Starbase 12, which had been unremarkable.

He told her that they had subsequently received orders to investigate an anomalous reading near the Mutara sector, which he described in considerable scientific detail that she read with interest because she had always loved the way his mind worked when it was engaged with a problem, the clean and joyful precision of it, even when he would have denied the joy entirely.

And then, near the end, almost as an afterthought:

Dr. McCoy has expressed the opinion that my report on the anomalous readings is, in his words, "the driest piece of writing since the Vulcan Science Academy redefined the word tedious."

I have not dignified this assessment with a response, as the report was accurate and thorough and his complaint stems from an allergy to precision that appears to be a fundamental aspect of his character rather than a correctable flaw.

The Captain found this exchange sufficiently entertaining to smile into his coffee, which I chose not to remark upon.

Amanda read that paragraph three times.

Then she wrote it down in a small notebook she kept in the drawer of her writing desk, the one she'd had since before Spock was born, in which she recorded things she did not wish to forget.

She did not analyze it yet. She was a patient woman.

The letters became, over the following months, a kind of rhythm. Not quite regular—Spock was not a man who scheduled sentiment—but reliable in the way certain natural phenomena are reliable, in the way the tide is reliable, working to its own logic even when you cannot see the moon.

She would go sometimes two weeks without hearing from him and then find three letters in sequence, sent on consecutive days, as though something had shifted and the words had come easier for a time before the door swung mostly closed again.

She wrote back every time.

She told him about Vulcan, about the garden, about the philosophical society she had joined the previous year, about her ongoing and deeply personal war with the particular stubborn shrub that grew along the south wall of the house and which she had been trying to convince to grow in a direction that suited her for the better part of a decade.

Spock, in the third month of correspondence, dedicated two full sentences to the opinion that her approach to the shrub was "fundamentally misaligned with the plant's biological imperatives," which she found so completely, perfectly him that she had to put the letter down and compose herself before she continued reading.

He mentioned the captain often. He mentioned the doctor nearly as often.

The mentions were, on the surface, entirely unremarkable.

He described crew activities and ship's business with the detached efficiency of a particularly conscientious log entry, and the captain and the doctor moved through these accounts the way important people move through their own environments: naturally, without announcement, as though the landscape had been arranged around them rather than the other way around.

Spock did not say, for instance, that the captain was remarkable.

He said that the captain had proposed a solution to a navigational difficulty that Spock had not considered, and that upon reflection the solution had merit.

He did not say that he found Dr. McCoy's company stimulating.

He said that Dr. McCoy had made an observation about Vulcan dietary customs during the evening meal that was, while characteristically imprecise in its framing, not entirely without a factual basis.

Amanda, who had spent the better part of her adult life learning to read the things her son did not say, read these letters with great attention.

She noticed, for instance, that Spock never mentioned anyone else on the ship with quite the same regularity.

She noticed that when he described the captain—James Kirk, whom she had met relatively briefly and found immediately and thoroughly charming in the uncomplicated way some people simply are, like sunlight, like a well-tuned instrument—the sentences became very slightly less spare.

Not flowery. Spock would never be flowery. But there was a quality to those sentences, a kind of precision that was almost too careful.

And she noticed that when he described McCoy—Dr. Leonard McCoy, who had shaken her hand at the welcome dinner with such genuine warmth and told her once that Spock had mentioned her, and who had watched Spock across the table with an expression Amanda had also filed away—those sentences had a different quality. Looser, somehow. Exasperated in the way that only genuine fondness can produce exasperation, the kind that requires years of accumulated specific knowledge about a person to achieve.

She was a patient woman, but she was not an unobservant one.

She did not say any of this in her letters.

She asked him how the anomaly investigation had concluded. She asked him whether Dr. McCoy had formed any further opinions about his reports. He wrote back to say that the anomaly had turned out to be a previously undocumented spatial compression phenomenon that he was in the process of writing up for the Journal of Stellar Cartography, and that Dr. McCoy had, upon reading the preliminary draft at the captain's instigation, declared it "only mildly insufferable," which Spock described as "a notable improvement."

Amanda wrote it in her notebook.

In the fifth month, there was a letter that was different.

She couldn't have said immediately what made it different. The format was the same—Spock's letters had a consistent structure, the heading, the factual update, the closing, with the personal material distributed through the middle sections in a way that she suspected he did not entirely notice he was doing. The sentences were as measured as they always were.

But there was something in it.

He had been describing a shoreleave they'd been granted on Argelius II, which was, she gathered, a pleasure planet of some kind.

Spock had spent most of the leave in the ship's library, which surprised no one, least of all Amanda, but apparently the captain had at some point climbed four decks to the library in person and informed him that taking shore leave in the library did not, in any medically or philosophically meaningful sense, constitute shore leave.

He had produced Dr. McCoy as supporting evidence, the doctor apparently having accompanied the captain for this purpose and having expressed several opinions on the subject, some of which Spock chose not to transcribe in the letter on the grounds that they were not suitable for documentation.

They had taken me to a restaurant. It had been loud. The menu had not contained a single item that met Vulcan dietary standards, but Dr. McCoy had spoken at length with someone in the kitchen and produced a plate of something that was at minimum structurally similar to food I could eat.

The captain had looked extremely self-satisfied about this for reasons I still do not fully understand given that he had not been the one to arrange it.

It was not an unpleasant evening. I find that I make this observation with some frequency when I attempt to analyze time spent in their company, which is itself a data point I have not yet determined what to do with.

Amanda read this sentence so many times that she could have recited it from memory by the time she finally closed the letter.

She did not write it in the notebook. Some things were too delicate for notebooks. She simply held it in her mind the way she had learned to hold the good things, carefully, without too much examination, the way you carry something that might break if you looked at it too directly in the light.

She wrote back about the south wall shrub. She told him it had, against all probability, produced a flower.

The letters continued through the winter and into the following year, measured out in the time of a different sky than the one she watched from her window.

Spock wrote about a first contact situation that had required considerable diplomatic delicacy and during which the captain had demonstrated, according to Spock, a talent for intuitive improvisation that was "statistically unlikely to work as consistently as it does, and yet does."

He wrote about a medical crisis on deck seven that Dr. McCoy had managed under conditions that Spock described with the same careful neutral language he applied to everything, but which Amanda, reading between the lines as she had become practiced at doing, understood to have frightened him considerably, and which had resolved well.

He wrote about chess games in the captain's quarters, which apparently happened regularly on late-night evenings when the ship's schedule permitted, and about arguments with Dr. McCoy about topics ranging from the biological basis of emotion to the correct temperature at which to serve coffee. 

A topic which apparently they had argued about for forty-five minutes during a gamma shift when there was little else to do and the captain had eventually settled it by declaring that the correct temperature was the one that resulted in the most efficient consumption of the beverage and they had both agreed that this was a completely useless answer.

Amanda laughed at that one. Genuinely laughed, alone in her study, in the late afternoon light of a Vulcan day.

She was beginning to know these two men through the medium of her son's carefully restrained prose, and what she knew of them she liked.

The captain was brave and quick and had, she suspected, a quality of wholehearted attention that Spock did not always say he valued but which anyone who knew Spock would understand that he must.

Dr. McCoy was something else, something harder to name—passionate and sharp and possessed, it seemed, of both a gift for genuine care and a complete inability to express it without several layers of antagonism first, which she suspected suited Spock better than either of them would have admitted.

In the eighth month she wrote to Spock, carefully, that she had very much enjoyed meeting his colleagues during her visit, and that she hoped he was well, and that she would be interested, if he was willing, to hear more about them. Not the missions. The people.

He took two weeks to respond.

Mother,

You will understand that I find this request somewhat difficult to fulfill, not because I am unwilling, but because I am uncertain what information would be relevant or useful to convey. I am aware that humans find interpersonal detail interesting in a way that does not always translate to equivalent Vulcan frameworks.

I will attempt to comply. However, I ask that you not draw conclusions from whatever I write that I have not explicitly invited.

This was, Amanda recognized with considerable warmth, her son's way of saying: please be kind about this.

She wrote back that she would draw no conclusions whatsoever, and that she was simply a mother who was interested in the life of her son. Both of these statements were, in their own way, completely true.

The letters that followed were extraordinary.

Not in language. The language remained Spock's: precise and formal and given to the subordinate clause, sparse with adjective, deeply suspicious of adverb. But the content shifted in a way that Amanda, who had been watching for it, recognized immediately.

He wrote about the captain's laugh. This took him three sentences, all of which were technically descriptive rather than evaluative, but which nonetheless communicated—to a reader who had been paying attention—that the captain's laugh had been noticed. Catalogued. Filed somewhere.

He wrote about an evening when Dr. McCoy had come to the science lab uninvited, late in the ship's night, with two cups of something he claimed was tea, and had sat on the stool beside Spock's station and not said very much. Spock reported this without visible confusion and without explaining what the doctor had come for, which Amanda found more informative than any explanation would have been.

He wrote about a planetary survey in which all three of them had been on the surface together, which had involved a cave system, a navigational difficulty that was apparently partially McCoy's fault and which McCoy disputed vigorously, and a period of several hours in which the only available light source was a handheld torch that the captain had been carrying and which they had had to share.

The survey had been scientifically productive. There had been several interesting mineral formations. The captain had identified a species of bioluminescent lichen that I am fairly certain had not been previously catalogued.

Then, at the end of the paragraph:

Dr. McCoy informed me, upon our return to the ship, that he had not been concerned at any point during the navigational difficulty. I did not point out that he had been holding the captain's arm since approximately the third hour underground, as I did not believe this observation would have been welcome. The captain appeared aware of it, however, and chose not to remark upon it either.

Amanda read this and sat very still for a moment.

She thought about what it meant—not about McCoy and the captain, or not only about them—but about what it meant that Spock had noticed. That Spock had noticed and had chosen not to intervene, not to remark upon it, not to catalogue it with his usual scientific impartiality, but had instead made a small quiet decision to protect something.

She wrote the sentence in her notebook.

Then she wrote below it: he doesn't know yet.

The months continued.

She tracked the Enterprise's mission logs in the public Starfleet feeds, not religiously, but sometimes, the way you might glance at the weather in a city where someone you love is living, and she would sometimes recognize things—not specifics, the logs were formal documents and not in the business of describing mineral formations or late-night tea—but shapes of things, the broad outlines of events that she would later see reflected in Spock's letters from a different angle, from the inside of them, which was an angle no mission log could provide.

He wrote to her about a diplomatic mission that had gone wrong in several directions simultaneously and which had required the captain to make a decision that Spock described with such careful neutrality that Amanda could read the disagreement underneath it like a current under still water.

He wrote about the argument that had followed—they had apparently argued, the captain and Spock, and it had been significant, and Spock wrote about it with the stiff formality of a man who was still not entirely sure what to do with the feeling it had produced—and then, three letters later, about the conversation that had resolved it. He had gone to the captain's quarters. They had talked for a long time. Spock did not say what they had said.

He said only:

I believe I understand him better now than I did before.

In the next letter, which came four days after that one:

Dr. McCoy told me this morning that I was not as difficult as I seemed. I asked him what this was intended to mean. He said that it was intended to mean exactly what it said. I did not find this clarifying.

And then:

I have thought about it since.

Amanda smiled so broadly that the cat, who was asleep on the chair across from her and generally unbothered by human expressions, opened one eye to look at her.

She began to notice a change in how he wrote the names.

Not the names themselves—he called them the captain and Dr. McCoy in the letters the same way he always had, properly, a little formally, the way you address someone when you're being careful—but the frequency.

The pattern.

The way they appeared together in sentences, the way a sentence that began with one of them would often come to rest against the other, the way the two of them had become in Spock's letters a kind of unit.

He wrote about the chess evenings.

They had evolved, apparently, in the way things evolve when they are made of more than two people—the captain had invited McCoy one evening when the doctor had been off-shift and had nothing else to do, and McCoy had made it comprehensively clear that he didn't play chess, and the captain had made it equally clear that this was not the point, and Spock had recorded this exchange without comment.

McCoy had come the following week as well. And the one after that. He still didn't play chess. He drank bourbon and argued with both of them about things unrelated to the board, and this had apparently become the new structure of good evenings, and Spock had not commented on this either in the letter, had simply described it as the current arrangement and moved on to the next topic.

But he had described it. He had thought it worth telling her.

Amanda, who could have told you the precise weight of each thing Spock chose to tell her versus the far vaster category of things he chose not to, noted this carefully.

She wrote back: it sounds as though the chess evenings have become something of a tradition.

He wrote: that is an accurate characterization, yes.

She considered this response for a long time.

She had met James Kirk for perhaps four hours over a few separate occasions during the visit, and she had formed opinions in that time, because she was an observant woman with decades of experience reading people, and her opinion of James Kirk was this: he was the kind of person who walked into a room and made everyone in it feel that they were exactly where they were supposed to be.

Through some quality of genuine interest in the people around him, some fundamental orientation toward the world that said I see you and I find you interesting and I am glad you are here. She had watched him with Spock. She had watched the way his attention rested on her son, easy and warm, without the slight effortfulness that other people sometimes showed when they were around Spock, the small adjustments they made to account for him, the careful calibrations. Kirk hadn't calibrated. He had just—been there. Easy with it.

And McCoy, whom she had spoken to for longer, who had sat across from her at dinner and asked her about her work on Vulcan with the focused interest of a man who genuinely wanted to know and not a man who was making conversation—McCoy had watched Spock with something else. Something that looked, from where Amanda sat, very much like the particular species of helpless exasperation that only arises from long acquaintance with someone you cannot stop finding worthwhile.

She thought about her son in a cave with these two men, watching McCoy hold the captain's arm in the dark, and choosing not to say anything.

She thought about him sitting in the captain's quarters on some evenings with a chessboard between them and a doctor who didn't play chess and a captain who apparently understood that the point was not the chess.

She thought: oh, my son.

In the fourteenth month of correspondence, there was a gap.

Not the ordinary kind of gap—she had learned to read those, understood that they meant Spock was occupied or that there was nothing he felt he could articulate in the time available or simply that the rhythm had shifted temporarily. This gap was six weeks long, and when the letter finally came it was shorter than any letter he'd sent her since the very first one:

Mother,

I am well. The ship is well. I will write at greater length when I am able.

Live long and prosper.

Spock

She read this very carefully, as she read everything from him carefully, and then she did something she very rarely did, which was to contact the Starfleet public affairs office and inquire, as pleasantly as she could, whether the Enterprise had encountered any significant difficulties in the previous two months.

The public affairs officer had been polite and largely unhelpful, which she had expected, but had mentioned that the Enterprise had been involved in an incident in the Klingon neutral zone that had been, quote, resolved satisfactorily.

She thought about what resolved satisfactorily might look like, from the inside of it.

She waited.

The longer letter came ten days later.

It was, she thought, reading it, the most honest letter he had ever written to her. Not because it said more than his other letters—it didn't, quite, at least not on the surface of it—but because she could feel the effort in it, the careful choosing of words that were not quite adequate for what they were trying to carry.

He told her about the incident in general terms, in the formal, stripped language of a man who is still too close to something to describe it directly. There had been a confrontation. There had been a period of genuine uncertainty about the outcome. He said this without saying more.

And then:

I have been, in the days since, engaging in a great deal of what I would characterize as unnecessary review of events that have already concluded and cannot be altered by further analysis. I recognize this as unproductive. I have been unable to entirely discontinue the practice.

She knew what he was saying.

She knew he was telling her that he had almost lost them, or had believed for some period of time that he might, and that this had made something clear to him that perhaps he had not fully known before. About what it would have meant.

She did not point this out. She wrote back: I understand. I am glad you are all safe.

Then she said, and she chose each word with care: I think perhaps the people we do not know we need until we nearly lose them are the ones who matter most of all.

She sent it before she could take it back.

His response, this time, came within two days.

I believe you may be correct. I am not certain what to do with this conclusion.

Amanda held the letter in her hands for a long time. Outside, the Vulcan sun was going down, and the sky was doing the thing it did at this hour, cycling through colors that shouldn't have worked together and did.

She thought: he's nearly there.

She thought: be careful with him.

She wrote back: I don't think you have to do anything with it, yet. It can simply be true for a while.

The next six months were different in a way that was, paradoxically, harder to describe than what had come before.

He wrote about ordinary things. He wrote about the mineral formations he was still writing up for the Journal of Stellar Cartography and about a disagreement he'd had with a lieutenant in his department and about a particularly interesting nebula they had passed that he had spent forty-eight hours observing. He wrote about these things with the same spare care he had always used.

But he also wrote things like:

The captain has a habit, when he is working through a problem on the bridge, of putting his fist against his mouth and looking at the middle distance. I have observed this many times. I find that I have come to recognize it as preceding a decision worth attending to.

And:

Dr. McCoy spent the better part of a gamma shift in the science lab last week under the pretext of reviewing the medical applications of the mineral survey data. I was not deceived by this pretext. I did not say so. We worked in considerable silence for approximately three hours and he left without explaining his presence and I did not ask. It was, I find, a style of company I am not opposed to.

And once, just once, near the end of a letter that had been mostly about the theoretical implications of a spatial phenomenon they'd documented:

I think perhaps I am not as good at not caring about, and for, things as I used to believe.

Amanda read this sentence and felt something in her chest expand, warm and a little painful.

She wrote: I know. I've watched you become very good at it, over the years, and I was always a little sad about it. I'm glad the practice is failing you.

He did not respond to this directly, which was itself a response.

The twenty-second month brought a letter that began entirely normally and then contained, approximately two thirds of the way through, a question.

Not a question that announced itself as such. Spock had never been good at asking for things directly. The question arrived in the form of an extended hypothetical, a scenario framed at first as an abstract philosophical inquiry of the kind that, had she not been his mother and had she not been reading his letters for nearly two years, she might have mistaken for a genuine academic question.

I have been considering, in a theoretical capacity, the question of how one communicates a thing of significance to individuals with whom one has an established and valued relationship, when the communication of the thing carries the potential to alter the nature of that relationship in ways that cannot be predicted or controlled.

Theoretically speaking, there is a Vulcan precedent for structured disclosure in certain relational contexts, but I am uncertain whether it is applicable here, given the cultural frameworks of the individuals in question. I would be interested in your perspective.

Amanda read this and felt the particular mix of tenderness and amusement that had been one of the central feelings of her entire life as Spock's mother.

She set the letter down. She got up and made a cup of tea. She sat with it in the garden for a while, looking at the shrub along the south wall, which she had decided she was no longer fighting.

Then she went inside and wrote back.

She said: theoretically speaking, I think the most important thing is not the method of communication but the timing of it. There is rarely a perfect moment. There is often a true one, which is different. A true moment is not the one that feels safe—it is the one that feels necessary.

She paused. Then added: also theoretically speaking, I think that people who know you and value you already generally know more than you've told them. You may be saying less new information than you believe.

And then, because she was his mother and because she had waited long enough: whoever they are, I think they are very lucky.

He didn't write back for eleven days.

When he did, the letter was brief, and it said:

Mother,

Thank you.

I will write again soon.

Live long and prosper.

Spock

She recognized this as the letter of a man who had made a decision, or was in the process of making one, and who needed his hands free.

She wrote back: I'll be here.

The gap that followed was eight weeks, which was, by her established calibration of his silences, a significant one. She did not reach out to Starfleet this time. She did not reach out at all.

She had promised, implicitly, to wait, and so she waited, and she tended her garden, and she sat in her study in the evenings and looked at the notebook she'd kept since the beginning and read back through what she'd collected there, the sentences and fragments, the data points she had never mentioned to him, and she thought about her son, who had spent so much of his life trying to need less than he did, and who had apparently, in the middle of deep space with a captain and a doctor who didn't play chess, run out of ways to do it.

She was glad.

She was so glad it felt a little foolish, sitting alone in her study, feeling it about a thing she had no direct knowledge of and was only inferring from a series of letters from a man who communicated in the negative space between what he said and what he didn't.

She hoped it was going well. She hoped very much that it was going well.

The letter, when it came, arrived on an early morning, which Amanda had always been fond of as a part of a day, the long unhurried quality of it, the sense of time that had not yet decided what to do with itself. She was in the garden when the notification came through, and she finished what she was doing before she went inside to read it, because she had a feeling—the kind of feeling she had learned not to dismiss—that this was a letter she wanted to read sitting down, with nothing else requiring her attention.

She sat down.

Mother,

I hope this letter finds you well. I will begin with the shrub, because I know you will wish to discuss it, and because I find that it is easier to approach the subject of decisions obliquely.

I have been reconsidering my earlier assessment—that your approach was fundamentally misaligned with the plant's biological imperatives. I believe I was incorrect. I think perhaps the more accurate observation is that you and the shrub have arrived, over time, at something that is not quite what either of you intended, and that this is not the same thing as failure. I wanted to tell you that. I am not certain I am speaking only about the shrub.

I have also made another decision, which I will now attempt to describe with clarity, though I am aware that clarity has not always been my strongest attribute in this area of subject matter.

I have spoken with Jim and Leonard.

The conversation was not straightforward. There were several points at which I believed I had miscalculated significantly, and at least one point at which Dr. McCoy—Leonard—said something that was technically an insult and practically a declaration, which I did not fully appreciate until later. The capt-Jim is somewhat easier to read than I have previously suggested in my letters to you, though I expect he would be surprised to hear me say so.

The outcome was, on balance, positive. More than positive.

She put the letter down on her lap. She looked out the window for a moment, at the bright colors of a morning that was, after all, a good kind of day.

She picked the letter back up.

I am aware that you have been, throughout the past two years, considerably more patient with me than my letters perhaps warranted. I am also aware, because you are who you are, that you noticed a great deal that I did not intend to share and that you said nothing about it, and I want you to know that I found this—that I find it—I want to say that I am grateful. That is what I want to say.

I am also writing with a request, which I am somewhat concerned will surprise you after so much time.

We will have shore leave in six weeks. Jim and Leonard have expressed an interest in visiting Vulcan, if that is agreeable. Jim has, I believe, a genuine interest in the geological formations of the L-langon mountain range, which I find credible. Leonard has said that he wants to see the house where I grew up, which I find—I find that I am not sure what I find about that. I thought perhaps you could tell me.

I hope it would be agreeable to you. All of it.

He signed it the way he always signed it.

Amanda set the letter down again and sat for a long time.

She thought about James Kirk standing on the bridge, easy and warm, making the room feel like exactly the right room to be in.

She thought about Leonard McCoy shaking her hand and asking her about her work with the focused attention of someone who genuinely wanted to know.

She thought about Spock at dinner with the two of them, her son at a table on a ship far out in space, somewhere between stars, in a cave with a torch, in a library to which someone had climbed four decks to retrieve him, at a chess table, in a science lab in the long quiet hours.

She thought: oh, my son. I know.

She got up and made a fresh pot of tea, because some letters deserve ceremony, and she brought it back to her desk and sat with it and the good light of a morning and the open notebook beside her.

Then she wrote back.

My dear Spock,

I have been waiting, though I want you to know that I was not impatient about it. I was only watching. You have always been worth watching.

I would be very glad to have you all. The house is large enough, and I have thought for some time that the south courtyard is underused in the evenings. I believe it would suit.

Please tell Jim that the L-langon geological formations are best approached from the eastern trail in the morning before the heat sets in. Please tell Leonard that the house is much as it was—I still have the books you chose to leave behind when you went to the Academy, which I have suspected for many years you meant to come back for.

Tell them both that they are welcome here. That this is a home that has always been glad to have people in it who are good to you.

I love you, Spock. I have always loved you, across every distance and every silence and every letter you took your time writing. You have always been mine to love, and I find that now you are bringing me a little more of you than you had before.

Come home. Bring them with you. The shrub has produced three flowers and I intend to make the most of them.

Live long and prosper.

Your mother