He was already unpacking groceries, organizing them with the same methodical approach he brought to coaching. “It means it’s so dark here that we should be able to see the Milky Way clearly, among other things.”
“The Milky Way,” I repeated slowly. “For real?”
He paused in his unpacking to look at me. “That’s why we’re here.”
The simple statement hit me hard. He’d remembered a casual comment from months ago, had planned this entire trip to show me something that mattered to him. How many people had ever paid that kind of attention to what I wanted?
We worked together to enhance the fire that was already burning, adding logs until it blazed properly. The warmth filled the small space quickly, and I stripped off my outer jacket, hanging it on a hook by the door.
“Hungry?” Nils asked. “I could make us something simple before we go outside.”
“In a bit. I want to see these famous stars first.”
He smiled. “Get the warm clothes on. All the layers.”
Bundling up took longer than expected. Thermal underwear, regular clothes, then snow pants and the thick sweater. Gloves, hat, scarf. By the time I was done, I felt like the Michelin Man.
“I can barely move,” I complained, attempting to bend my arms.
“You’ll be grateful when we’re standing outside in minus-twelve-degree weather.”
I’d known it was cold and it wasn’t like I wasn’t used to it, but that was a whole new level. “Minus twelve? Are you trying to kill me?”
He chuckled. “Celsius. Minus twelve Celsius. That’s…” He did a quick calculation. “Ten degrees Fahrenheit or something? The telescope requires steady hands. Hard to have those when you’re shivering.”
Ah, okay. Yeah, that made more sense. Still cold, but nothing I couldn’t handle. He’d bundled up too, though somehow, he managed to look elegant rather than ridiculous in his winter gear. We headed out onto the small deck, and the cold hit like a physical force, making me gasp.
But then I looked up.
“Holy fuck,” I breathed.
The sky was impossible. Where I was used to seeing maybe a dozen stars on a clear night in Buffalo, here, there were thousands. Millions. They spread across the darkness in layers and clusters, some bright and sharp, others so faint, they only appeared in my peripheral vision. And cutting across it all, unmistakable even to my untrained eyes, was a river of light.
“Is that…?”
“The Milky Way,” Nils confirmed, his voice warm with pleasure. “Our galaxy, seen edge-on. Those billions of stars are just a fraction of what’s out there.”
I stood frozen, neck craned back, trying to process what I was seeing. How did people see this and not spend every night staring up? How had I gone twenty years without knowing this existed above me?
“Adan? You still with me?”
I realized I’d been silent for several minutes. “Yeah. Just… Holy shit. This is incredible.”
“Wait until you see it through the telescope.”
He’d already set up the equipment on a flat section of the deck, working with practiced efficiency despite the thick gloves. The telescope was smaller than I’d expected, but clearly high-quality, all matte black metal and precise adjustments.
“This is your small telescope?” I asked.
“The other ones aren’t exactly portable.” He made a final adjustment and stepped back. “Here, look at this.”
I bent to the eyepiece, and my world exploded. What had been a fuzzy patch of light to my naked eye resolved into countless individual stars, so densely packed, they seemed to overlap and merge. Colors I hadn’t expected—blues and reds mixed with white—and depths that made my brain hurt trying to comprehend the distance.
“That’s the Pleiades,” Nils explained, his hand warm on my back. “An open star cluster about 444 light years away. Those stars were all born from the same nebula.”
“What do you mean, born?”
And he was off, explaining stellar formation with the same passion he brought to hockey strategy. I asked question after question, genuinely fascinated by the vastness of it all. He showed me different objects: galaxies, nebulae, even Saturn with its rings visible as more than a dot.
