Eight months had passed since her parents had been murdered.

Some times it seemed as though it had been mere days.

And sometimes it seemed to have been years.

The pain of their loss had faded, she missed them still, but the hurt was nearly gone.

The anger still burned.

And the guilt.

She didn’t think that those two feelings would ever go away.

But their being gone was no longer agony.

She still had nightmares about what had been done to them.

And she still needed to only close her eyes to see their broken bodies again.

She sometimes felt like she was betraying them, with how easily she had gotten on with her life.

She knew they wouldn’t think so; that they would be happy that she was happy.

And she was happy.

Happier than she’d ever been.

It bothered her that her parents had to die for her to be the happiest she’d ever been in her life.

What a sad commentary on the life she’d lived for twenty five years, that she was happier now, even with the grief she felt for the deaths of her family than she’d ever been before.

Her parents had loved her.

She did not doubt that.

But her father had been a tinker. He’d spent days at a time in his basement lab, fiddling with this and that. She had spent little time with him until she was ten or so, old enough to be trusted to listen.

And her mother a doctor on a rim world. She’d constantly been out and about dealing with emergencies and day to day details. She was often gone for days on end because she was the only doctor for six days ride.

She’d gone through a series of babysitters, local girls and a few local boys until she was six. But from then on she’d been on her own.

The only sitter she really recalled had been Hazel. She’d watched her several times when she’d been about four, and it had been Hazel who’d introduced her to plants. The second time Hazel came to watch her, she’d brought seeds and some old child sized gardening equipment. She’d never lost interest.

She’d begun tinkering with the genetics