T'Vara looked at her. "That is a fair position" she said. "I am not asking you to change how you work with him. What happened was between him and me and I handled it. I am telling you because you are my roommate and because you work alongside him every day and I thought you should know what I know." She paused. "I also want you to know that I am not carrying it. I made the assessment, I made the decision, and it is done. I did not come here tonight because I needed to process something. I came because Lindsy cooked and you were going to be here and that was reason enough."

Mei-Lin nodded once. "Thank you for telling me."

The room settled again. Lindsy brought the grain to the table and set it down and they filled their plates and for a while nobody said anything about Avery and nobody needed to.

T'Vara looked at Mei-Lin, looking to change the direction of the conversation. "Cormus" she said. "You told me he earned the smile. I am asking you to expand on that."

Lindsy turned from the cooktop with the expression of someone who had not been expecting that name in that context. She set her spoon down and waited.

"He asked me to dinner last night" Mei-Lin said. "He got the table by the viewport, put a candle on it, replicated champagne glasses for the mess hall table." She said it simply because the facts spoke for themselves.

Lindsy looked at her for a long moment. "Champagne glasses. For the mess hall. He is twenty three." She said the last part not as a criticism but as a fact she was placing alongside everything else and finding the combination worth sitting with.

"I know" Mei-Lin said. "But by the end of the first hour he knew things about me that most people take much longer to pick up on. He was paying attention in a way that was specific rather than just polite. He actually listened and then said something real about what he heard." She picked up her glass. "I know it may look odd."

Lindsy leaned against the counter and looked at her. "It does not look like anything" she said. "It looks like someone who made a decision that was right for her and then something unexpected happened and she said yes to it because it was also right for her. Those two things do not compete with each other. They are just both true. The decision you made about Zedd was yours and it was honest and it cost you something and you made it anyway. And then days later someone put champagne glasses on a mess hall table and you let yourself enjoy it. That is not a contradiction. That is someone who knows what she wants and does not apologize for it."

Mei-Lin was quiet for a long moment. When she looked up her expression had the quality of someone who had needed to hear something said out loud rather than just kept thinking it. "I had been looking in a direction for a while that was not quite right for me" she said. "I knew it before I said anything. And when I stepped back I found out there were other directions available that I had not been looking at because I was looking somewhere else. One of them had champagne glasses."

"One of them had champagne glasses" Lindsy agreed, and went back to the cooktop.

T'Vara had been listening carefully. "There is context here I do not have" she said. "About Zedd."

Lindsy set her wine down and turned from the cooktop. "Mei-Lin and I had a conversation in the astrometrics alcove a few nights ago. She told me she had decided to keep things with Zedd professional. And after she left I sat in the alcove for a while and thought about what she had said and what it meant and then I went and chimed at his door. He let me in. I stayed. The morning after he offered me the command liaison role and the quarters on deck two and I moved in that afternoon."

T'Vara looked at the king sized bed and then at the two chairs angled toward each other by the viewport and then back at Lindsy. She assembled the picture quietly for a moment. "The quarters make sense" she said. "The command liaison role is a separate question."

Lindsy turned from the cooktop. "How do you mean?"

"The quarters are personal" T'Vara said. "The role is professional. Zedd offered both at the same time which means either he had been thinking about the role independently and the timing was coincidental or the two decisions were connected. Either way the role is now going to be read by everyone on this ship through the lens of what happened the night before he offered it." She looked at Lindsy directly. "That is not a criticism. It is an observation about the position you are in."