A Midnight Feast by Emma Barry

Author:Emma Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penny Bright Publishing, LLC

When the front door slammed, Margie winced. And not because the kids were already asleep.

Of course Mitch would return from space after the kids were in bed. Almost a week away, farther than any man had ever been, and the kids wouldn’t know he was safe until morning.

Margie bit her lip and rubbed at her breastbone, at the ache that had settled there the moment they’d lit the rocket beneath her husband. Like a slow acting poison, it had burned the entire time, making her breaths short and her stomach sour.

But of course she hadn’t shown any of that publicly. She couldn’t. She was the leader, the one who held all the astronaut wives together when their husbands were in the gravest of danger… and she had to hold them all together even when it was her husband this time.

She’d thought she was done with him, that anything Mitch did couldn’t touch her anymore. But it turned out that sending him into the infinite void triggered that same panic and fear that used to grip her every time he got into a plane.

He was coming into the living room now, muttering as he did. Not too loud, but enough for her to hear it in the kitchen. She chewed her cuticle, uncertain if she ought to say something. After being so terrified that he wouldn’t come back, it was perverse to not want to talk to him.

Was this really what they’d come to? That she couldn’t even speak to him when he was back from outer space?

“Mitch?” she called out uncertainly.

There was a muffled crash, as if he’d tripped over something, then a curse he didn’t usually use in front of her, although she knew he’d taught it to Tom. “Margie? What the hell are you doing up?”

He didn’t sound pleased.

She moved into the living room and flicked on the light. There he was, so tall, in khakis and a plain white t-shirt, needing a shave. Her heart kicked, driving out the ache that had been flattening it for too long.

“You’re home.”

Mitch looked around the room as if he were searching for something. “No thanks to fucking Parsons. ‘Trust the machines’ they say, ‘We don’t want you to pilot the damn thing’ they say, and who completely balls up the entire mission? That thinking machine they put in. As if I don’t have more hours of experience than a computer.”

The rendezvous mission had almost failed because of a faulty computer—Margie had been terrified listening to it play out on the squawk box that had magically arrived a few days before the mission—but it had been saved in the end. And who cared if the computer had malfunctioned? Mitch had come back, safe and sound.

“But it was fine after all,” she said. He needed to remember that. “And the next one will go more smoothly.”

Mitch sent her a sharp look. “The next one? This is it for me. I’m not going up again. They’re already talking about bringing in even more guys.

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