“… so I told him, if that was how he felt, I wasn't taking the job.” Freya lifted the chopsticks to her mouth, noodles hanging either side. She didn’t know what Kaylee had done to the sauce, but it was tasty.

“What did he say to that?” Mal asked, quietly intrigued.

“Nothing.” Freya paused as she chewed. Then added, “‘Cause I hit him.”

“You … why?”

Freya shrugged. “Because he pissed me off.”

“And so few people do that,” Mal said witheringly, tempering his sarcasm with a smile. Freya was finally blooming with her pregnancy, and it felt good to goad her a little.

“Oh, ha, ha.”

“So what happened?” Jayne asked, picking a stray fibre from his teeth.

“Well, there he was on the floor. And that was the problem. He was so big, so … round … he, well, he couldn’t get up. He just sort of rolled around.” A grin began on her face as she remembered. “Of course then I started to laugh. I tried not to, I really did. But the sight of him, like a ball of flesh … I laughed. And kept on laughing. And you know how it is, when you laugh, you can’t do anything, you’ve got no strength? So there he was, getting angrier by the minute, and me laughing so much tears were running down my cheeks, neither of us able to do any damn good at all …”

The others were all laughing too, even Zoe, who was having to be careful with the wound she’d sustained only barely healed. It had been ten days, and she was a lot better, but it pained sometimes. “I'm surprised he didn’t shoot you,” she said.

“He couldn’t reach his guns,” Freya admitted, feeling a slight pull of nausea herself.

Mal said, “You’ve certainly led an interesting life.”

“Well, the joys of having your own ship.” Freya breathed deep to calm down. She’d had occasional bouts of morning sickness for a long while, and this was nothing she couldn’t live with. But she put down her chopsticks and pushed her plate away.

“Do you miss it?” Simon asked, watching her carefully, not unaware of how she felt, but deciding it was probably okay.

“So