Sam could only nod. He could think of no other reply. The sky had all of his attention.

He’d never seen the stars look like this.

He’d never imagined they could.

“You didn’t get out of L.A. much, did you?” Dani said.

“Not really.”

On vacation once, with a friend’s family north of Santa Barbara, he had experienced nights this dark—but the house had been in deep woods, up in the hills, and he’d never gotten a look at the sky. The only other trips he’d taken were to visit relatives, all of whom lived in other big cities. He had an uncle in Philadelphia he’d visited a few times, who’d taken him fishing in the Pine Barrens east of town. It was almost this remote out there, but Sam had only been there in daylight.

In Los Angeles, even on a clear night, he might have seen five or six bright stars through the light-pollution. Out here there had to be thousands, scattered like tiny chips of broken glass across the ink-black night. The bright ones looked great, but the fainter ones were what left him in a daze: there were just so many of them. Thousands everywhere he looked. How had he gone his whole life without seeing this?

“Come on,” Dani said. “It’s better lying down.”

Sam stared up for another few seconds and then followed her the rest of the way to the table. Up close, he saw that the thing was huge. Not a standard rectangle-shaped table, but a big square one with seats on all four sides. The top surface was probably six feet by six.

Dani climbed on and lay on her back, on one half. Sam took the other.

He saw at once what she meant. Lying down was the way to look at the stars. No strain in your neck from craning it upward. No need to think about your balance. Best of all, no horizon. His field of view was entirely filled up with sky.

For at least a minute neither of them spoke. They just lay there under the vault of stars, the night sounds of the open country all around them, the humid breeze pressing against them, sliding past.

“When I first moved here,” Dani said, “and I got my first look at this, I thought I was going to be happy here. Between this and Lauren, I really believed it. That was before I learned certain things about this town.”

He waited for her to go on, but for a long time she didn’t.

Then he heard the scrape of her shoulders on the tabletop, and turned to see her sliding closer. She stopped six inches away, and pointed at an especially bright star above them.