Chapter One
Shawn
There’snothing quite like the shock of your high school crush busting through the front door. I just wished I hadn’t been running around in a little pink pair of boxer briefs when it happened.
Like, could I have chosen a more embarrassing way to see Cass again after all those years? What an absolute nightmare.
The evening before, everything had been peaceful as I steered my old Subaru down the winding Appalachian road. The trees were so lush and full, they held the evening rain in their branches like clouds, and I couldn’t have been happier as I headed toward a quiet, relaxing summer alone. I looked for the familiar bend that led to my grandma’s old house, then turned at the tilting wooden post, the only thing left from an old horse fence.
Rolling slowly down the dirt road, I grabbed my phone from the console, then called up my best friend, Audrey. “I made it,” I said brightly. “And right at sunset, too.”
“With how many books you packed, I’m still surprised the car could haul it up those hills.”
“This guy?” I joked. “We’ve been together since high school. We can go anywhere.” I reached out and patted the dashboard, and the car lurched across a hole in the road. “Anyway, just wanted to let you know I’m here safe!”
“Enjoy the peace and quiet, Shawn. And promise me you’ll call if you get lonely out there.”
“I promise I will.”
“I mean it,” Audrey stressed. “We both know you’d disappear into the library forever if I didn’t come and drag you out for a cup of coffee.”
“You work in the library,” I pointed out.
Audrey sighed. “You know that’s not what I mean.”
“Thanks. I’ll be good, and I promise to call soon.”
I parked the car and hopped out. The old two-story farmhouse still looked just as good as it did in my memory. Big square windows framed either side of the covered porch, and while the glass needed cleaning and the siding begged for a coat of white paint, the silver light of dusk made the house shine. The brick chimney sticking out the top filled me with a cozy, satisfied warmth. I paused and inhaled the familiar scent of the budding spring woods, sweet and earthy. Perched at the top of the hill, Grandma’s house received plenty of light during the day. And although the woods had reclaimed the farming land years ago, the yard stretched out in the rear, clearing a path toward my grandma’s old art studio.
Best of all, though, was the sky. Perfect stargazing. Ever since I was a kid, these were the stars that captured my imagination, stunning me with their beauty and igniting my curiosity. I was only a tiny part of a massive universe, and it sent shivers across my skin to think about my place in relation to it all. For just a moment, I stood there, eyes pointed upward as I found myself again in the splash of glittering light.
Audrey understood how much I cared about that place. Even if she always tried to drag me back down to earth, she understood why those stars were so important to me and worth putting everything else in my life on hold for.
Inside the house, I flicked on a light and was glad to see everything in working order. Grandma died a few years ago, and my mother, my brother, and I had all found we unwilling to sell the place. There were just too many good memories there. Instead, each of us used it as a retreat once or twice a year, as well as spending the holidays there together, and we paid a local guy to do upkeep while we were away. I quickly tossed my bag on the couch, scuffled across the wooden floor, and hit the bathroom to relieve myself.
Grandma would love that I was spending the summer in Kentucky, and she would especially love what I planned to do with my time. I was fresh off completing a master’s degree in Astronomy, which had consumed the past three years of my life. I’d devoted myself to the studies, which required a depressing amount of math, even though my brain wasn’t naturally gifted at scientific reasoning.
But I threw myself into the grueling work anyway and forced my tired head to understand the concepts, and I did it all with a big grin on my face, too. I never got high scores, but I wasn’t trying to run NASA or anything. All I cared was that I was going to spend the rest of my life thinking about the stars and the mysteries of the universe. If I could contribute in even a tiny way to answering the questions I started asking as a lonely, daydreaming kid, I’d be satisfied with my life.
Sentimental, I know. Just like Grandma was. When I was growing up, I wasn’t the happiest kid in the world, but she would always welcome me for a visit, share her paintings with me, and encourage my stargazing. What most everyone saw as wasting time, she saw as curiosity that should be encouraged, and she was always happy to sit there with me and just gaze.
Now, with my degree in hand, I decided to give myself one shot to pursue one of my secret dreams. I wasn’t going to rush off to some laboratory job like the rest of my graduating class but to take one summer in the Appalachians and to actually follow my heart.
I stepped outside again to get the groceries I’d grabbed on the way, then stopped to look at the moon, just starting to rise as a tiny sliver. I cast my eyes around the sky until I caught Venus, glowing bright and close to the horizon.
Audrey suggested one time that I let myself get lost in the sky so I wouldn’t have to face the fact that I was missing romance in my actual life, but I disagreed. When I looked out over the galaxy and thought about my tiny place in it all, I didn’t feel like I was hiding from anything. I felt like I was right there, seeing it all with clear eyes.
She was right about the lack of a love life, though. I couldn’t deny that.
It’s not that people didn’t like me. I was good-natured, even if I was a little shy and occasionally awkward. But I knew I was cute, in a way, with my big eyes and nervous hands.
It was just that the few times I had tried to date someone, it had fallen flat pretty much from the start. I wanted to wait and be patient, like how boyfriends are supposed to come along when you least expect it, but as the years passed, still, no one ever aligned with me.
Eventually, I kind of stopped looking.
I dropped the bag of groceries on the old linoleum counter. The ceilings throughout the house were high and lined with old cedar, and the walls were still covered with framed family photos and paintings of the hillsides by Grandma. The family had all added our own touches to the house, too, like some clay flowerpots Mom had made and the record player my brother Leo and I had dragged to the house last year.
I found the bottle of red I had picked up from the gas station and popped the cork with a grin. Four months alone wouldn’t bring a boyfriend, that was obvious. But it did give me the chance to write my book, a book I’d been thinking about for years. I wanted to tell the story of the stars and to share the wonder they inspired in me with other people. Scientists had figured out so much about our universe in recent years, but most people still had the same understanding that they’d learned in high school science. I had taken in all this information at school, and now it was zipping around in my head and banging against my skull, demanding to be let out and shared with someone else. And for some reason, the way my heart sang when I looked at the stars convinced me that I could tell that story and make it sparkle for people who weren’t experts.
