“Six.” He smiled broadly, happiness radiating from him like sunshine.
I whistled. “That’s a lot!”
“An entire family at once.” He nodded enthusiastically. “Ours will be still significantly smaller than an average family on Aldrai. But that’s why the marriage program was created in the first place—to reduce the number of babies per mother while increasing the frequencies of pregnancies.”
“How frequent are they now?”
“Not very. Few Aldraian women get to experience childbirth because pregnancies are so rare among them. When mixed with humans, however, it happens more often and with fewer babies. That’s why human spouses have become so sought after here.”
“They are?”
“Well, when I applied, I got eight matches in less than a week.”
“Eight? Really?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “But it took me weeks to choose the right one. The marriage program is pretty strict. It doesn’t allow for casual dating or frivolous ‘let’s-try-and-see-how-it-goes.’ They want at least a full year of commitment. So, I wrote to all eight women and exchanged a lot of photos and videos with each of them. Esstal stood out from the very beginning. There is just something about her that felt...” He waved his hand in the air, his expression turning dreamy as he searched for a perfect word to describe his wife.
“Right?” I suggested.
“That’s it.” He snapped his fingers. “She was right from the start. Exchanging letters with her felt like having a real conversation. I could be myself, and she accepted me. It’s always been so easy to talk to her. You know what I mean?”
I nodded because I did. I had that very feeling just yesterday during my conversation with the captain. It felt...easy, just like Stefan said. Not that I considered the captain as a match, of course. But I’d been thinking about him. So many questions remained about that man.
He hadn’t been around that morning. Stefan said he went to the office early, which surprised me because I thought he was supposed to be off for a while.
“Stefan, do you know what happened to the captain’s first wife?” I asked. “She was an Aldraian, wasn’t she?”
She had to be. The marriage agreement with Earth was barely a year old.
“Yes, she was,” he confirmed. “Historically, Aldraians rarely marry outside of their race, the main reason being that they aren’t biologically compatible with anyone but humans.”
“If they both were Aldraians, how come they only had four kids?”
Stefan inhaled slowly.
“Well, I don’t know much about what happened. In town, they say there was an accident. His wife crashed her aircraft into the lake over there.” He gestured at the large body of water glistening outside of Diria, in the direction we were flying.
“You said these things don’t crash.” I gripped the edge of my seat.
He shook his head. “No, they don’t. Normally. But who knows what exactly happened that day? Apparently, Xavran wasn’t in the aircraft with her, but he got to the scene of the accident before anyone else did. She was in the last month of her pregnancy. The doctors only managed to save four babies.”
“Oh no...” I pressed a hand to my chest, to the spot where my heart ached for the captain. That explained his frown when he’d spoken about the birth of his children. Their birthday would forever be the day his wife and the rest of his children died. “This is horrible. But why did it happen? How did she crash?”
“I honestly don’t know. Xavran doesn’t speak about that. Ever. The records were never made public, either. But there are a lot of rumors.” He lowered his voice. “Some are worse than others.”
I leaned closer. “What do you mean?”
“Some say Xavran was more involved in his wife’s death than he wants everyone to know.”
“What? No.” I recoiled from him. “Do you believe that?”
He shrugged. “Like I said, these are just rumors. Personally, I suspect his late wife’s family are behind them. They never got along well with Xavran, and lately... Well, they aren’t allowed into his home. He only lets them see the kids on holidays and stuff.”
I thought about what he’d just said. This was shaping up to be a rather difficult situation.
“Did the captain love his wife? Do you know?”
“I believe he did. Some say he was madly in love with her.”
Fully absorbed by our conversation, I hardly noticed as the aircraft descended. Only when it jolted softly from the contact with the ground, I realized we’d landed.
“Wow. That’s a lot to take in.”
“You don’t need to worry, Susanna,” Stefan assured me. “I wouldn’t let you stay and work for Xavran if I didn’t believe you’d be safe in his home. He’s a good man.”
A good man.
I wished to believe that with all my heart. But my heart had terribly misled me before. There once was a time when I believed Tom was a good man, too, that he was honest and incapable of stealing.
Opening the door panel on my side, I unclipped my seatbelt. “Has there been an investigation?”
“There has. The authorities deemed it an accident and closed the case,” Stefan replied, climbing out. “Like I said, you have nothing to worry about.” He opened the front gate for me but didn’t enter himself. “I need to go home for a couple of hours now to prep for dinner. It’s my turn to cook tonight. I’ll get back around lunchtime and take you grocery shopping. Okay? We’ll go to school early this afternoon. I want you to meet the kids’ teacher and the moms of their classmates. Between the four of them, they go on a lot of playdates.”
“Okay.” This was real. Classmates, playdates, other moms. All the things that came with a normal childhood. “Looking forward to it.”