In public, she did her best to hold it together. Don’t cry. No tears, Eloise kept telling herself. You chose to not get married to him, so you can’t admit your relationship– or that you’d planned to get married to him once the war was over, she knew.

That was too much. Tears rolled like raindrops down her face. They blurred her eyes, making her office in Péricard Tower remind her of her childhood home in the much poorer DuQuesne Tower in the same city. Those last few words of her speech still echoed through her head. She’d tried to reassure the people that they still had a chance. But all the while as she’d been saying it, she’d seen Javier and what she’d imagined his death to be, in her head. She hadn’t looked as confident as she knew she needed to be in this time of fear. Let the tears roll before Eighth Fleet appears and the Republic dies, she finally told herself.