Chapter 9 - Under the Same Stars

A year later, the garden behind the Hawthorne house looked completely different.

The twenty-eight identical white chairs were gone. In their place were four long, rough-hewn cedar picnic tables that Grant had commissioned from a local timber co-op. There were no caterers with white cotton gloves measuring runner spacing with tape.

There was a barbecue pit near the hedges, smelling of hickory smoke and grilled peaches. Marco the magician was sitting on an overturned plastic milk crate by the fountain, showing seven kids from the Fourth and Elm youth center how to make an egg disappear into a newspaper.

Nova sat at the head of the center table. She was ten today.

Her hair was longer, pulled into two thick braids that rested on the shoulders of a new sweatshirt—this one green, showing the full map of the James Webb Deep Field.

Beside her, Sky was busy assembling a three-stage model rocket kit with a small bottle of wood glue, her fingers covered in red paint and gray adhesive.

"You're using too much glue on the fin," Nova observed, leaning over to inspect the fuselage. "The drag coefficient is going to pull it two degrees west."

"The wind’s coming out of the east anyway," Sky countered without looking up, wiping excess glue onto her jeans. "It’ll correct itself at five hundred feet."

Grant stood by the barbecue pit with Clara. He wore an old faded denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms, a pair of stainless steel tongs in his hand. Clara wore jeans and a black sweater, holding two glass bottles of ginger beer.

"She got into the Lakeside STEM program," Clara said quietly, nodding toward Sky. "Full scholarship. They said her interview on planetary orbital mechanics was the best they’d seen in five years."

"She didn't need the scholarship," Grant said softly. "The Hayes Trust would have paid for three campuses."

"She needed to earn it herself," Clara said, bumping her shoulder gently against his. "Thomas wouldn't have let her take an elevator if there were stairs to climb. You know that."

Grant looked down at her and smiled. The tightness around his eyes—the perpetual, haunted grief that had defined his face for five years—had softened into something warmer, weathered, and at peace.

"Look," Nova called out, pointing toward the western sky.

The afternoon sun was sinking behind the Olympic Mountains, turning the waters of Puget Sound into a sheet of hammered copper. Above the jagged peaks of the ridge, the first faint pinpricks of the evening stars were beginning to bleed through the lavender twilight.

Sky wiped her hands on a napkin, reached into her backpack beneath the cedar table, and pulled out the old aluminum oatmeal tin. The black electrical tape was peeling slightly at the edges, the perforations still bearing the tiny scratches from Thomas Hayes’s awl.

She didn't turn on the flashlight. She held the tin up against the fading light of the real sky, aligning the punched holes of the Southern Cross with the rising silhouette of the mountains.

Nova reached out and took hold of the tin’s base, her hand covering Sky’s.

"Mission ready?" Grant called out from the grill.

Nova looked back at her father, then at Clara, then around the crowded, messy, loud garden filled with children laughing, dogs barking near the fence, and the smell of sweet smoke drifting up toward the hemlocks.