Rafaela only got to see snippets of her family's lives. She was almost always busy, and when she wasn't, they were. She might have imagined that she was suffering alone, as she played the King of a system that didn't even want one, but she knew better. She had learned better over the years.
She spent her time learning to understand things that she had thought she knew already, all over again. Politics, science, astrophysics. Some of those things seemed obvious on reflection, but she didn't get much time for reflection, or anything else. She and Brendan still struggled to meet up between their duties, even after discarding so many safety protocols. Like every set of Kings and Queens that had existed before them, it turned out.
