Another silence. This one feels different from the first one.
"Beck."
"What."
"This is very sneaky for a man with no apparent feelings."
"I have feelings," I say. "I just don't narrate them constantly. Unlike my daughter."
She makes a sound that is distinctly a laugh she tried to swallow and failed at. "I'm putting that on a coffee mug."
"Please don't."
We drive the rest of the way with the windows down and the cold mountain air coming through. Gemma finds the granola bars, confirms there are two, hands me one, and keeps the other. The old forestry road is rough enough that the truck earns its paycheck, and she braces against the dash with one hand and eats her granola bar with the other, completely unbothered.
"Does this road go anywhere besides here?" she asks.
"Fire break access road. Ends at the ridge."
"How do you know about it?"
"I drove every road above town the first week I moved here." She looks at me. "Habit," I say. "New territory."
"That's very captain of you."
"It's useful. Tonight, for example."
"Empirical evidence," she says. "Very you."
The ridge opens up without warning, the tree line dropping away to a wide flat clearing with nothing above it but sky. I cut the engine and step out, and the cold hits clean and immediate, carrying the smell of pine and dry grass and nothing else. No town noise. No light except what's overhead.
Gemma steps out of the truck and tilts her head back and goes completely still.
"Oh," she says quietly.
The Milky Way is a smear across the middle of it — not the faint suggestion you get from a city, but the actual thing, dense and luminous, and even before the peak of the shower the stars are pressing down so close they feel structural.
"Yeah," I say.
I get the camp chairs from the truck bed and set them up side by side, facing the open sky. Pour coffee into the thermos cap and the second cup I brought and hand her the good one — the cup, not the cap — because I am trying here, and she accepts it without comment and drops into her chair and tips her face up again like she can't stop looking.
I sit in the other chair, drink my coffee from the thermos cap, and wait.
The first meteor comes across low and fast, a thread of white light that's gone before you can track it.
"There," she says.
"I see it."
Another one, brighter, crossing higher overhead. Then a pause, then two more in quick succession, and Gemma makes a small involuntary sound, low enough that she probably doesn't mean it to land. It happens when she sees something she likes. I've noticed it before — over Ivy's dinosaur drawings, over the best pour from Peak Grounds when Micah gets the ratio right.
I set down the thermos cap.
"Gemma."
"Mm." She's still watching the sky.
"I want to say something and I'm going to do it badly, so I'm asking you to stay in the chair."
