Page 308 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"But you already booked passage-- that takes planning!" "Not if you buy the starship."
"Why are you in such a hurry? The voyage takes decades--" "Twenty-two years."
"Twenty-two years! What difference would a couple of days make? Couldn't you wait a month to see my baby born?"
"In a month, Val, I might not have the courage to leave you."
"Then don't! What are the piggies to you? The buggers are ramen enough for one man's life. Stay, marry as I've married; you opened the stars to colonization, Ender, now stay here and taste the good fruits of your labor!"
"You have Jakt. I have obnoxious students who keep trying to convert me to Calvinism. My labor isn't done yet, and Trondheim isn't my home."
Valentine felt his words like an accusation: You rooted yourself here without thought of whether I could live in this soil. But it's not my fault, she wanted to answer-- you're the one who's leaving, not me. "Remember how it was," she said, "when we left Peter on Earth and took a decades-long voyage to our first colony, to the world you governed? It was as if he died. By the time we got there he was old, and we were still young; when we talked by ansible he had become an ancient uncle, the power-ripened Hegemon, the legendary Locke, anyone but our brother."
"It was an improvement, as I recall." Ender was trying to make things lighter.
But Valentine took his words perversely. "Do you think I'll improve, too, in twenty years?" "I think I'll grieve for you more than if you had died."
"No, Ender, it's exactly as if I died, and you'll know that you're the one who killed me."
He winced. "You don't mean that."
"I won't write to you. Why should I? To you it'll be only a week or two. You'd arrive on Lusitania, and the computer would have twenty years of letters for you from a person you left only the week before. The first five years would be grief, the pain of losing you, the loneliness of not having you to talk to--"
"Jakt is your husband, not me."