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There’s always a party on Coruscant. This time, the Ersos’ attendance is mandatory.
It’s as decadent as Lyra has come to expect, all gleaming floors and pillars of imported stone. She walks in on Galen’s arm and she can tell the important people in the room by the ones that mark their presence. To most of the guests, they’re an engineer and an geologist, respectively brilliant and predictably dull. The people whose eyes skim over them have never heard of the Strategic Advisory Cell, or the Republic Special Weapons Group. Lyra is almost jealous of them.
She glances at her husband out of the corner of her eye, and he offers her a wry smile. “We’re expected to socialize,” he says, and so they wade their way into the crowd.
Lyra has never enjoyed the endless mingling and small talk of these functions, and today is especially uncomfortable. Even walking past humanoids with faces the color of a smoggy sunset or tentacles down to their hips, the curve of Lyra’s bulging stomach makes her feel inhuman. She finds her hand straying over her stomach as if she can push it back down to its regular size like squeezing the air out of a bag. Galen doesn’t notice. His eyes scan the faces around them.
It isn’t long before she’s entrapped in a conversation with a Coruscanti dressmaker about fashion trends in the Senate compared to conventions on the delegates’ homeworlds, and by the time Lyra has made the mistake of asking a question she realizes her husband is gone. Her annoyance is chased by a twinge of unease that settles deep in the pit of her belly. She cranes her neck to try and spot him, but she’s still being lectured about the political implications of Naboo beadwork, and it’s some time before she can gracefully make her escape.
Dodging several more conversations, Lyra drifts through a storm of color and sound. The flutter in her stomach is echoed by a dull thump—a kick that comes again and again, an off-rhythm echo to her heartbeat. She turns around, peering past the confectionary costumes that balloon up to fill her vision—and then she sees him.
He’s standing on the edge of the room and he’s not alone. The crisp white uniform would be enough to identify his companion even if Lyra didn’t know his face. Krennic leans against the wall at Galen’s side; while Galen’s eyes idly scan the party, Krennic looks nowhere but her husband’s face. No one approaches them to draw them into conversation, despite the benefits that associating with an up-and-comer like Krennic might have offered. They’re enclosed in their own bubble of public intimacy, and no one tries to breach it.
Not even Lyra. She had taken a step forward as soon as she saw them, intending to hurry to her husband’s rescue from this man that Galen somehow considers a friend. The first step is the only one she takes. Galen laughs at something Krennic says, and she sees the curve of Krennic’s lips as he leans in to say something quieter into Galen’s ear. It’s then that her husband looks up, and his eyes lock onto Lyra’s as if she had shouted his name. The smile at whatever Krennic is saying to him still lingers on Galen’s lips, but she sees something different in his expression—in his eyes. Guilt. Or maybe, shame.
That's when she knows that Galen is having an affair. Not physically—he wouldn’t do that to her, not now—but in every other way that counts.
There’s no anger. She’s understood from the beginning of their relationship, when she met her husband’s closest friend and wondered at how Galen could let such a snake drape himself around his shoulders, that her power over Galen will always be set against Krennic’s. Up until now she had made the mistake of thinking that power was all Krennic wanted. A miscalculation that she can read plainly in the tilt of Krennic’s head, the crinkle around his eyes. It’s not just her husband’s mind and work he’s after. He wants her husband’s soul. Perhaps he wants it as much as Lyra does.
She forces a smile onto her lips and makes her feet move, her hand on her belly and her eyes locked on her husband’s, a decade’s practice of making small talk with people she hates waiting on the tip of her tongue. Krennic sees her coming, and actually pulls back—it may as well be an admission of guilt. There’s no hint of it in his eyes, though. He looks at her and smiles. Lyra recognizes the challenge. It demands an answer.
She raises herself on her toes to plant a kiss on Galen’s cheek; when the weight of her stomach nearly overbalances her so that Galen’s arm slides around her shoulders. A steadying weight. She reaches up to slip her hand into his.
When she meets Krennic’s eyes again, he isn’t smiling. She inclines her head. I accept.