A blacklisted biologist. A seven-foot-four alien who hasn’t been touched in forty years. And the research contract I signed that turned out to be a marriage license.

I came to Rethaan because no lab on Earth would hire me after I blew the whistle on falsified data. The fellowship came with alien soil, heavier gravity, and a research partner named Tavaan, an agricultural overseer whose body runs four degrees hotter than mine and glows amber when I walk into the room.

Gray nutrient packs showed up at my workspace every morning. He built me a shelf that listed four degrees to the left because he’d measured my sample cases while I wasn’t looking. When he told me he wanted me, he said it with the clinical precision of a soil report and meant every word. He’d known we were married since the day I signed. I found out at a communal meal when someone congratulated us.

The last institution that made decisions about my life without asking destroyed my career. The last man who said he wanted me left when I became inconvenient. I came fourteen light-years to start over, and another system decided what my life would look like without consulting me.

The man who built me wrong furniture and courted me with wet chalk can’t hide what I do to him. Forty years of dim light flooding back, visible to every person on the station. I just don’t know if I can trust something I didn’t choose.