She had only known Richard Adar to be bashful, or even a close cousin of that, once in his life. It was their fourth month as lovers. He was still a newly-minted Chief Executive searching for his niche and voice, and she was his close aide in education and other matters. They worked together in a harmony envied by the married.

It had been a night for lying. I’ll be working all night, he’d told his wife. I’ll be away at a conference, she’d told her few friends. They’d met at a little inn on the edge of the northern colony limits.

It had been discreet and romantic and beautiful. Over dinner, he’d taken her hand and fastened a delicate golden bracelet around her wrist. A tiny crescent-shaped pendant hung between them speaking volumes of their forbidden liaison. Some kind of love and definite lust under the twilight.

It’s the rest of my moon, he had told her. You are the rest of my moon. Flattered and touched, she had leaned across the table and kissed him until the front of her dress caught fire on a candle. She’d screamed and he’d poured his glass of water on her.

After the panic, they’d stumbled, drunken and laughing, back to their room. He made love to her spiritedly that night, the last time she was sure he had. She woke up the next morning daring to briefly think she had fallen in love.

That day, they’d returned to the real world and he’d turned into the man who would rather impose obedience through violence than discuss peace. He became a man she could not love nor defend. She stood idly by until she reached her breaking point, because she told herself that she believed what he believed. Then, without blinking, he transformed into someone she didn’t want to know. Love was out of the question; turns out, it always had been.

Yet, five months later, she sat in his seat with his title and thought of him graciously, any bitterness forgotten. He was not her lover -- someone else filled that role now and much better, and she’d never quite loved him that way, anyway --but he had been her friend for years. She recalled the good times and excused those occasions when he was the moron her lover claimed he had been. For all those moments that were unforgivable, she could look back and remind herself calmly that he was bashful once and let that make the difference.