So at least one of Radiant Cobb’s children had inherited her looks.

That’s what flashed through Zoë’s mind when she first saw Jude, or Judith as her full name was. At around thirty years old, she was small and slender, and with a certain shyness about her that made her look even smaller. She arrived at the house with her husband, a decent looking kind of man who introduced himself as Fergus Campbell, and their two kids, a five-year-old boy and a baby girl, and she threw herself at Jayne, planting a kiss on his cheek, with such affection that only an adoring baby sister could show. Jayne responded by hugging her with the same tenderness he’d shown his mother.

He was a little standoffish towards the rest of the little family, though. He politely shook the hand of his brother-in-law, but didn’t look him in the eye, and he glared at the children as if they were little bombs that could blow up in his face at any time. The feeling was mutual, at least with the older one, whose name was Finnegan. He stared at his ‘uncle Jayne’ with undisguised suspicion and then ran to his grandmother for protection. Wise kid.

Radiant had insisted that the crew of Serenity should stay for supper, and so they were all together fifteen people crammed into the tiny living room that night, too many to be seated around one table, but they had somehow managed to find sufficient room for everybody. Mattie, for instance, stayed in his chair by the fireplace, eating off a tray in his lap, and River apparently had decided she should stay on the footstool next to him, or at least Simon hadn’t been able to get her to sit anywhere else.

There was definitely no shortage of food; Radiant had managed to produce an impressively massive feast in that little kitchen of hers, mostly potatoes and some sort of meat. Jayne was eating like he hadn’t had a decent meal in years, and come to think of it he probably hadn’t; the awkwardness of suddenly being home certainly hadn’t ruined his appetite. It made Zoë smile a little, and when she n