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man? Or who was so shrewish that he left her?”
    Kit frowned. Mrs. Smith hadn’t exactly been nice—her final glare at him from the window had been positively livid—but shrewish ? “She seemed okay.”
    Every head turned to stare at Kit.  
    “What’s she look like?” Storch asked, his smile tipping into a leer.
    “She’s...” He searched for a description, but all that came to mind was that carrot hair and all those freckles. Freckles on top of freckles, scattered across her nose and cheeks.
    But the other men didn’t want to hear about freckles. They wanted something more risqué. “She’s attractive. On the shorter side”—he remembered how he’d had to bend down to bandage her finger—“but if you like redheads, she’d be your type. Kind of like Debbie Reynolds.”
    There. That should sound disinterested enough. He didn’t want to dissect Mrs. Smith with the guys, not in the way they wanted to.
    “Who’s also divorced,” Storch said.
    “Hey,” Dunsford protested. “That wasn’t her fault.”
    “A redhead!” Carruthers snapped his fingers. “I knew it. Told you she was a shrew. What did Margie say?”
    Kit suppressed his grimace and tapped the manual faster against his leg.
    Dunsford shrugged. “That she was standoffish. I don’t remember much else. You know Margie, I can’t keep track of all the words that come out of her mouth.”
    Standoffish. Yeah, Kit could see that. But Mrs. Smith was alone in the world, without a man—she’d had to come to Kit when she’d cut herself. He ought to go over tonight and see if she needed any help. A man’s help.  
    “You’ll have to keep us informed,” Carruthers said, in a way that made it clear he’d make a move on Mrs. Smith if conditions were favorable.
    Oh hell no. If Kit couldn’t make a pass at her, Carruthers certainly couldn’t. “She’s got kids.”
    Every man in the room deflated. Kids looked at them like they were heroes. Like Superman, the Lone Ranger, and Buck Rogers all rolled into one. It was hard to pursue a lady when her kids had a shrine devoted to you in their bedroom.
    “That’s that, I guess,” Carruthers said.
    Kit tried not to be pleased at the defeat in the other man’s voice. It wasn’t like he could make a play for Mrs. Smith either, but Carruthers went through women like tissue. He’d run over Mrs. Smith.
    Carruthers took up his typing again, the noise seeming to hit Kit right behind the eyes with each keystroke.
    “Jesus,” Storch muttered. “I’ve already got a headache.”
    “You young fellas can’t hold your liquor,” Dunsford said. At the age of thirty-six, Dunsford was the oldest of the Perseid Six—and he could drink a prodigious amount.
    “A headache?” Carruthers asked, still pecking at the typewriter. “Isn’t that what your girl from last night said too?”
    Storch gave him the bird.
    Kit picked up the spec manual and flipped back to the description of the heat shield.
    Silence fell as all four men went back to their paperwork. So much paperwork.
    His mind slipped into the rhythms of the spec manual, the jargon becoming a fluent language as he immersed himself in it, until—
    “Campbell.”
    It wasn’t loud, but then Parsons didn’t need to shout to make him jump.
    As darkly sallow as ever, the lead Perseid engineer stood in the doorway. With his white short-sleeve button-up and thick horn-rimmed glasses, he was the most engineer-looking engineer Kit had ever seen. Given his job, it was only fitting that the man looked as he did, but he didn’t have to be so smug about it.
    Parsons also hated Kit—all the astronauts actually—which made their encounters just that much more pleasant.
    He sneered at the spec manual in Kit’s hands before marching over and snatching it up.
    “What did you do to this?” His nose twisted as his sniffed. “Is that liquor?”
    Kit snatched it back. “It’s mine, so what does it matter?”
    “It matters because you’re sloppy. It matters