I pulled my head away and scowled, smoothing my hair back into place. “I am too subtle.You’reoblivious. You were gonna spend the entire day hanging out with those two.”
Helen Barbanel shot us a look, and I realized we weren’t behaving like the captive audience she expected for her tour. I elbowed Ethan. “Shh.”
“Youshh,” he whispered back.
For the final leg of the tour, Mrs. Barbanel led us to the small rose garden encircled by a tall hedge. We moved to the back of the crowd, and Ethan whispered in my ear. “Your boss is smiling.”
“I’m a genius,” I whispered back.
The rose garden had a gazebo in the center, and everyone wanted a picture as the tour ended. Cora glanced at it wistfully. “Dad, take a picture of Cora.”
“Oh no, I’m fine,” she protested, but I’d seen her Instagram. I knew her aesthetic.
“Dad,” I insisted.
He turned his palms up. “I don’t mind.”
Smiling a little sheepishly, Cora went up the gazebo steps. At work, she was usually no-nonsense and when she joked, her humor was faintly dry. But now she laughed brightly, loosening up as she struck a few poses. And maybe she was just grinning for the camera, but her easy smile was still directed at my father. Dad grinned too.
Afterward, everyone returned to the lawn for a small selection of tiny quiches and miniature pound cakes, the cream fresh-whipped and the strawberries glistening with beads of juice. Mrs. Barbanel had also made a few treats specifically from her garden: rose-hip tea and a cake soaked in rose syrup.
Dad beckoned me and Ethan to join him at the table where he and Cora had taken a seat. He was, unfortunately, talking around a mouthful of food, but with great animation, pulling up images on his phone. “They’re amazing. Did you see the latest ones?”
“Yeah.” Cora nodded enthusiastically. “The third one? Wild.”
“You kids see this?” Dad turned his phone toward me and Ethan. Red-orange wisps—the color of candle flames—spread across the black of space, pinned down by a smattering of orange-white pinpoints.
“What are we looking at?” Ethan asked.
“The Large Magellanic Cloud. It’s a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way,” Cora said.
“New pics from the James Webb telescope,” Dad said, proud as though he’d taken them himself.
The James Webb Space Telescope was NASA’s flagship infrared observatory. As the Harvard Computers had studied glass plates, modern astrophysicists could use images from the telescope to observe the formation and evolution of stars, planets, and galaxies.
Dad and Cora were talking up a storm about the images. Dad seemed thrilled to have an expert to talk to. Usually he was the passionate amateur expounding to his audience, but now he drank up everything Cora had to say.
“We have a framed photograph of the Pillars of Creation onour living room wall,” I told Ethan, watching Cora out of the corner of my eye. She had a postcard of the Hubble photo pinned to one of her corkboards. It showed interstellar gas and dust in the process of forming stars.
“You do?” she said.
The tips of Dad’s ears reddened. “Kind of dorky, I know, but I think it’s beautiful.”
“No, I love it,” Cora said. “I have it in my office.”
Ethan kicked me under the table. I kicked him back, happily.
Everything was going well until Ethan’s parents wandered into the backyard. I hadn’t seen his father much over the summer; he popped on and off the island, mostly over the weekends. Now, the two came straight over, introducing themselves to Cora and making Ethan’s back straighten.
“Just here for the weekend,” Dan Barbanel said cheerfully when Dad asked. “But I’ll be back for the conference and the comet party in August, of course.”
Ethan’s head whipped toward his parents. “You’re coming to the conference?”
“Of course.” His mom smiled. “We wouldn’t miss your talk.”
Ethan blinked several times, looking horrified.
“Wonderful,” Dad said.
