"Yeah, you're right. I should look at it this way, some of the ensigns and yeomen are in their late teens. I got along with them well enough. How much harder can it be to relate to someone in, say, their mid-teens? Even younger? So it's fine. It'll be fine." She hopes she doesn't seem like she's trying to convince herself as much as she is. But this whole thing is already becoming more than she'd expected.

She knows that she'll need to step up in more ways than even Starfleet expected of her. Especially since she doesn't see anyone else from the Enterprise there. And Christine has never been the sort to back down from a challenge. She knows her worth, she knows what she can do, so now she'll have to do it for teenagers and children.

"...yeah. You're right. We'd been having problems already, but that doesn't justify the way things happened. I think I was too in my own head. This is gonna sound wild, but we had a pair of time travelers from the future on the ship for a while. And one of them told me that I wasn't so much as a footnote in Spock's story. That got to me more than I wanted to admit at the time. So while I'm coming clean, it did get to me. Because I cared for him. Still do. But I don't think there's a way around this, at least not for now."

She felt dejected. She'd told Ortegas once that if she ever settled down with one person and a big part of her hoped it would be Spock. But it seemed that it wasn't meant to be.