“Well, the view from here isn’t actually very good, is it?” Rachel said. She disliked Harley so thoroughly she took every opportunity to contradict him.

It was certainly true that on this June morning, the view toward the twin gantries that hid the giant, three-barreled Saturn VII rockets was hazy and indistinct. Still, it made a serviceable backdrop for Megan’s doc—which still lacked a title. My Husband’s Going to the Moon sounded dated, like a filmstrip from the Apollo days. Another challenge.

Megan glanced back at Rachel. She was a small girl, favoring her father, bright, a bit too verbal at times, usually friendly and easy to get along with, though not this trip. Megan was relieved to see that she had momentarily transported herself back to her communal e-space with her Slate. “Ah, the teenage years . . .” she murmured, just loud enough for Harley’s ears.

Or so she thought. Rachel’s eyes opened and she uttered, “Oooo, the teenage years,” in a perfect, contemptuous imitation of Megan.

Ordinarily that sort of challenge would have triggered a corrective response from Megan, but today she let it pass. Rachel’s snippiness and her dislike of Harley was caused by fear that her father, Megan’s husband, Zachary Stewart, would be killed on Destiny-5, the first crewed flight to the Moon of the twenty-first century.

Five years ago, when Zack first rode a Russian Soyuz into earth orbit, Rachel had been too young to truly appreciate the dangers. But no longer. Even if being a teenager in the close-knit astronaut community in Houston didn’t provide reminders—such as the grown-up neighbor whose father had been killed in the Challenger accident—this trip surely had. They were presently driving on a stretch of State Road 405 known as Columbia Boulevard, named for another fatal NASA tragedy. And had Rachel noticed the turnoff to Roger Chaffee Street? He had been one of the Apollo astronauts who died in a fire in 1967—

Just to their right, as they crawled past the airport and slowly approached the causeway across the Banana River, sat the Astronaut Hall of Fame and its space mirror monument—a thin black slab with names of all the astronauts who had died on missions or in training. At last count there were thirty.

Megan had briefly considered a stand-up in front of the mirror, with the twin launchpads in the distance, but not this trip. Not with a terrified Rachel.

Besides, she had her own night sweats and tremors to deal with. She would dream that Zack was falling ten miles to smash on the smooth face of the Atlantic. Or stumbling on some rocky outcrop at Shackleton Crater, his oxygen and life seeping through a tear in his suit. Or incinerating on reentry (the interior of the Destiny suddenly going yellow, then red, then disintegrating in agony). Or any of the seemingly endless ways you could be killed in spaceflight.

The true horror would be confronting those last moments and wondering, Is that it? Is that my life? It went so fast! What did I do?

“You’re getting that look again,” Harley said.

“What look is that?”

“You suddenly go silent. Your eyes go wide.” He nodded toward her hands. “And you start digging your nails into your palms.”

“I’m allowed to show a little stress.”

“Agreed. My job is to distract you when you do.”

“Even though it doesn’t change the situation.”

“It only makes it less terrifying. And keeps you from giving your competitors some YouTube moments.”

Megan’s mouth formed the words Screw you. She liked Harley better than most of Zack’s often insufferable, smug astronaut colleagues. But not today, not this week. Harley was serving as the Crew Assist and Casualty Officer—the astronaut designated by Zack and Megan to help with mundane matters like travel and housing during the week leading to the Destiny launch. It was a rule in NASA: Every crew member selected a CACO.

And so far, Harley had been a great travel agent, finding Megan and Rachel a family friend’s condo in Titusville.

But should something go terribly wrong, Harley would also handle the funeral arrangements and insurance questions. He would be the one holding Megan’s hand at . . . well, it wouldn’t be Arlington. Zack was a civilian.

It would be at a graveside in northern Michigan, in Zack’s hometown of Marquette. Megan had managed to wrench that much if-things-go-wrong information from Zack in the past week.

So, now, every time she looked at Harley, she saw herself in black, with smudged face, weak knees. Too bad she wasn’t profiling Harley, because she had a title for him: He was her Escort to Widowhood.

“Do you believe in God, Harley?”

“Is that a comment on my driving?”

They had crossed the Indian River Lagoon and reached the Orsino gate to KSC proper, where the traffic had eased a bit. Of course, getting through the main gate didn’t mean the trip was over; the Kennedy Space Center spread over hundreds of square miles of coastal Florida swamp, with the Indian River to the west and the Atlantic to its east. Harley Drake clearly wanted to cover the route in ten minutes.

“Well, you could slow down a bit,” she said. “But the question remains.” Megan was used to asking pushy questions. She was spending time with Harley; might as well get to know more about him. He was younger than Zack, though he’d been an astronaut longer and came from a military background. He’d been an Air Force test pilot, so presumably he was conservative, possibly Evangelical, though Megan had never seen evidence of it.

“Meg, I most certainly do not believe there is a white-bearded guy who tells angels what to do, but I’m a superstitious flyboy, and I can tell you from way back in my flight school days—there are guys who just bear the, what the heck is it? The mark of Cain? A black cloud over them. You just know that somewhere, somehow, the universe is going to get them. It won’t be their fault, it’s just . . . well, God’s will. Whoever God is.

“Zack, by the way, is not that guy. The way good old Harley Drake reads the universe, your husband is destined to walk on another planet, then come home to give you a big wet kiss. How about that?”

He had such a goofy smile on his face beneath aviator sunglasses that Megan couldn’t help laughing. “Consider me reassured.”

But still she wondered. Based on what she’d learned from other astronaut spouses—female and male—Zack was high on the scale of personal openness. Not that the astronaut scale permitted him to be what a normal human would consider emotionally open.

She remembered how painful it had been to get basic burial information out of him—forget theological revelations! Questions about God and an afterlife had never been part of their marriage to begin with . . . pro forma attendance at a church, fine, both agreed on that. Both had been lapsed Catholics, so returning to Mass was easy—and good for Rachel. “At least she’ll know what she’s rejecting,” Zack liked to say.

But get her husband to tell her what he expected to experience after death? Nothing doing.

Not that she had ideas or confidence, either.

Rachel emerged from sleep, or distraction. “God,” she said, “how much longer before we get there?”

Harley slowed as traffic stacked up around them. “Here comes the last checkpoint. IDs, everybody!”

“I can’t find mine,” Rachel said. Then Megan handed the badge to her, trying not to smile. One point to Mom. She’d pay for it—

And here it came: Rachel sat up and announced, “I have to pee.” Megan wanted to laugh; it was impossible to actually win against a girl who kept changing the game.

“You can go when we get to the press site.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Do you see where we are?” At the moment they were in a line of cars and buses crowding the final gate into the compound where the gigantic white block of the Vehicle Assembly Building loomed over the launch control center.