She looked up at the sky and realized the stars had been speaking to her all along.

She just hadn't been listening.

The trouble was not language. Mara knew enough languages to misunderstand herself in several. She knew the household grammar of apology, the clipped professional dialect of grant applications, and the emergency vocabulary of hospitals, where every sentence came padded with caution.

The stars used none of these.

They spoke in repetition. Three white points over the water tower. A red blink above the radio mast. The long scratch of a satellite crossing the dark like a match struck and blown out.

For years, Mara had treated the sky as scenery. Then her father died, and the sky became a ceiling. Then Elias called about the garden, and the ceiling became a page.

She drove out after midnight with a thermos of burnt coffee and a printout from NASA's skywatching guide, because grief made her practical in embarrassing ways. If something was going to happen above the house, she wanted a diagram.

Elias met her at the gate. He looked smaller than he had at the funeral, though it had only been nine days.

"You see it too?" he asked.

Mara followed his finger. Above the pear tree, seven stars shone where no constellation should be. They formed a crooked line, then a hook, then a shape she recognized from the note their father had left taped inside his old field journal.

Not a word.

A map.