[She knows this. Of course she does. Concentrate hard on the things that were good, push the pain and it's ending away from you. It's the pieces that come after that are harder to classify. What do you do about a funeral, a tenuous relationship with the child of a man you were involved with when he asks you to help? About videos squirreled away behind hidden encryptions, only found after death? About the only physicality of him being left is a picture in a frame and imagining him talking to her one last time before she boarded her ship?

She should have gotten better with the idea of losing him early. She knew he was ill. She knew they wouldn't last. But she remembers, so clearly, going through the suicide mission in the Collector base. Pulling the rubble off of him before they made their final run, feeling nothing but unmitigated fear that she had killed him, that he would be the only one not to make it out alive. She knew, then, that she never wanted to live without him.

How silly an idea that was. As if she could ever stop.]

I'm sorry I didn't say anything sooner. I should've told you, I mean, honestly said something. Not just tiptoeing around it. It's been more than a year, I...

I'm sorry. I don't think I've ever really talked about him to almost anyone.

[Just barely to Garrus, to Chakwas. Little blips on the radar, few and far between, cast off into ocean between them.]