SPOILER WARNING: this is a short deleted passage from Gods and Conquerors, which would have appeared at the end of the chapter entitled "April 26th, 2124" (around location 1422 on Kindle; page 95 in the paperback). If you're reading the book and you haven't reached that point, you might not want to read on. 

So Ballard left, on a rocket bound for a planet nearly a hundred light years away. In his absence, Matilda raised a family with her new man, and had two girls named Patty and Su. The children were intelligent and very beautiful, and Matilda and her husband Francisco were natural parents. The subject of the Conqueror missions came up only thrice during the children’s childhood, when they were taught about the subject at school; and Matilda never once told them that she had married one of their heroes or that they had even met. She thought about Jon rarely, much more rarely than he would have liked to imagine, and when she did it was fleeting and without consequence. What had been such a devastating wrecking ball for him was a marble in a bag for her, as her issues were differently placed and always would be.

She and her husband retired at eighty-two and seventy-nine respectively, and moved out of London to Hastings, where they sat out the rest of their days staring out at the freezing sea and starting conversations with arty young people whom they would never see again. Her husband died at ninety-eight, from a heart attack. Matilda died two years later, 103 years old, surrounded by her children, flowers and a whole lot of love that she would have had to work too hard to earn from Jon Ballard.

So why did I delete it? Mainly because my editor told me to. But that instruction was given for good reason - we don't see Olena's life without Shelley or Tobias's life without Verne, so why should we see Matilda's after Ballard? This might have given the chapter a strong ending and tied everything up nicely, but without it the chapter still ended strong, and the story was told a bit more consistently.

So the moral of the story, I suppose, is that you should always listen to your editor. They speak sense, guys.