He told her about growing up, his parents and the geological field expeditions and what it was like to spend summers in places that were not comfortable but were always interesting. His parents had a particular philosophy about discomfort, that it was the fastest way to find out what you were actually made of, and he had spent enough time in the field to know they were right even when he had been too young to say so. She told him about Mars and the shipyards and what it did to a person to grow up inside the working heart of something rather than on the outside of it looking in, the way you learned to read systems by feel before you understood the theory behind them, and how that had shaped every engineering decision she had made since.

They found out that both of them had learned to fix things before they understood the theory behind fixing them and that both of them considered that the correct order and the conversation went somewhere from there that neither of them had planned for.

"My father used to say that the manual tells you how something is supposed to work" she said. "The machine tells you how it actually works. You have to listen to both but you have to know which one to trust when they disagree."

"Your father sounds like someone worth listening to" Cormus said.

"He was" she said, and the way she said it had a quality to it that told him it was a finished thing rather than an ongoing one and he noted it and did not push on it because some doors you did not open without being invited.

She asked about his parents and he told her about his mother specifically, a geologist who had named three separate rock formations and who had the particular stubbornness of someone who had spent her career arguing with mountains and had won more often than not. Mei-Lin laughed at that and said it sounded like a useful quality to inherit and he said he had gotten about half of it which was probably the right amount.

She had opinions. He had known this in an abstract way from working alongside her and it was considerably more present across a dinner table. She had opinions about systems and about people and about the specific kind of stubbornness that separated someone who was good at their job from someone who just thought they were, and she delivered them cleanly and directly without softening them for the room.

"The problem with most engineers" she said, "is that they fall in love with their solution before they have finished understanding the problem. They stop listening to the machine the moment they think they know what is wrong with it."

"Does that happen to you?" he said.

She considered it honestly which he had noticed she did with most questions, actually thinking rather than just answering. "Less than it used to" she said. "Starfleet taught me to trust my training. The years after taught me that my training was a starting point, not an answer."

He found it genuinely compelling in a way that caught him slightly off guard.

"You are surprised" she said.

"Not surprised" he said. "Recalibrating."

"Recalibrating what?"

"My picture of you" he said. "It was accurate as far as it went. It did not go far enough."

"What was the picture?" she said.

"Competent. Focused. Slightly intimidating in the specific way that people are intimidating when they are very good at something and do not feel the need to explain it." He paused. "Reserved in a way that read as private rather than distant."

"And now?" she said.

"Still all of those things" he said. "Plus the opinions and the thing about your father and the way you actually think about questions before you answer them." He looked at her. "Most people answer first and think afterward. You do it the other way around and it makes what you say land differently."

Something moved in her expression that was genuine and unhurried and caught him slightly off guard the way her smile always did when it arrived. "You have opinions too" she said. "You just deliver them differently."

"How do I deliver them?" he said.

"Like they are obvious" she said. "Like the opinion and the fact are the same thing and you are mildly surprised anyone needs both explained." She picked up her mug. "It is effective. People tend to agree with you before they have thought carefully about whether they actually do."

He stared at her. "That is the most accurate thing anyone has ever said about me."

"I know" she said, without any particular satisfaction in it, just the simple statement of someone who had assessed something correctly.