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Salla Zend was very quiet over the next week—so quiet that Han worried about her. He’d never seen her the way she was now. She refused offers to accompany Han and Chewbacca on a couple of Runs, even though Han wasn’t kidding when he said he needed her help. Jarik had recently found a girlfriend in the Corellian section of Nar Shaddaa, and was spending all available time with her. The kid had also hired on with Shug because the master mechanic was upgrading the hyperdrives on many of the Desilijic smuggling vessels. It was a big job, and Shug needed all the help he could get.

Salla began hanging out at Shug’s spacebarn every day, working on the hyperdrive upgrades, too. But when Han returned home from a run, she was always there to greet him, smiling, with an affectionate kiss. Her behavior toward him was … different … somehow. She had a way of looking at Han as though she were somehow … evaluating … him. It made the Corellian uneasy.

The most unnerving thing of all was that Salla asked him to teach her to cook. Having been raised by Dewlanna, Han was a fair cook, though he didn’t bother preparing meals just for himself. But, since he and Salla were together almost every night, Han had fallen into the habit of fixing a meal for them.

Suddenly, out of the blue, Salla wanted him to teach her. For some reason Han had a bad feeling about that. He couldn’t say why that worried him—after all, it wasn’t a big deal, learning to cook, right?—but it did.

He began with easy things … breakfast, stews, soups, then graduated to menus such as boiled traladon steaks with tubers on the side, imush-roots chopped and sauteed with hot sauce, Wookiee flat-biscuits with forest-honey glaze.

Salla paid strict attention and approached cooking with all the seriousness she’d have given to tearing down and rebuilding a faulty motivator matrix. She was so earnest about it that Han grew more and more troubled.

He considered asking her what was going on, but he didn’t want to pry. Salla had just lost her ship. That was reason enough for some eccentric behavior, he told himself.

One night, when she’d served the first meal she’d cooked all by herself, Han finished the last bites of slightly scorched ladnek tail and somewhat rubbery marsh-root soufflé, and smiled at her. “This was tasty, Salla. You’ll be a gourmet cook in no time!”

“Really?” she looked pleased.

“Sure,” he lied. Truth was, she had a long way to go.

“Han … there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said. “Something really important.”

Uh, oh. Here we go, he thought, with a feeling of dread. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Well, I’ve been making some plans. It won’t cost nearly what I thought, especially the hall, and I have a little bit saved. With what you’ve still got from the big sabacc game, we can do it. I’ve talked to a caterer, and—”

“Salla, what are you talkin’ about?” Han broke in, completely confused.

“Our wedding,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it, how you said you need me, and you’re right. We need each other. It’s time to go ahead and have a real life together, Han. Like Roa and Lwyll. Remember what a nice wedding they had? We can have something just as nice. I think we owe it to ourselves. All our friends can come.”

Han stared at her, too dumbfounded to speak. His first impulse was to shout, “Have you gone crazy?” but he counted to ten. Maybe Salla needed medical attention. She had suffered a blow to her head. Concerned, he finally managed, “Uh, Salla, I don’t think that’s in the cards right now.”

She chuckled. “I knew you’d say that, Han. Men! They never want to admit how they feel. Don’t you remember tellin’ me that you kind of envied Roa and Chewie, having a real family?”

Han remembered saying something along that line, but he certainly hadn’t meant for it to be interpreted like this. He shook his head. “Salla, honey, I think we’d better discuss this. You haven’t told anyone about this, have you? Or actually made any concrete plans?”

“Well … just a few people,” she said. “Shug, and Mako and Lando, and Jarik. And I put a reservation fee on the