Fallstreak holes were rare. The last time he’d seen this natural phenomenon was nine years ago. Before all that silliness. A pair of them, an imprint against the sky in the shape of lungs.

Fletcher blinked up at the sunset, mesmerized. A gap punched through cloud droplets that had frozen into ice crystals, as if the sky’s mouth had opened and was trying to speak.

He laughed at himself, not usually given to flights of fancy.

Dessie would be home soon. He should make a start on dinner. She’d be tired after a day of filming, and grouchy. She despised the dismissive way that some actors treated her, viewing her as the hired help. Once, she’d deliberately overbronzed a Hollywood name because he’d been so rude. “Never piss off the makeup artist.” She had laughed when she’d said it, but Fletcher knew she’d meant it. They’d only lived together for a few months, but he didn’t like pissing her off, either. Made her unpredictable. But if he cooked dinner, she’d soften, and when it came to bedtime she might not push him away.

All these thoughts were crowding his head, and he could almost smell the garlic and the tomatoes he would roast, the egginess of fresh pasta, a peppery undertone of basil leaves.

And he was turning to go, he honestly was.

But the sun fell upon the cylinder of his telescope, warming up the brass and lighting the fire within him, and the pull of the sky became too much.

As the glowing sphere descended toward the horizon, and the first, faint stars appeared, Fletcher lost himself in the wonder of the moment, the passing of day into night, the relentless cycle of time. It made him feel less than. An ant.

All around him was the sliding darkness of twilight. As the night deepened, a tattered skein of stars was thrown across the sky. He began to catalog the constellations, muttering the names over and over again.

But it could not drown out the knocking at the back of his head. The small, secret part that whispered to him, that offered up its seductions, nudging at him like a dog that demands to be fed.

Because if he was to aim his telescope downward and to the left, the gentlest of adjustments, he would have a window into number twenty-five, and the family who had moved in yesterday.

Specifically, the mother and the girl.

But he mustn’t.

With a jerk, he directed his finderscope skyward until his vision was filled by a darkening swath of fabric, pricked by a thousand silver pins.

And he began to mutter again, repeating the words over and over.

But this time he was not glorifying the stars and the shapes that they made. Even their cold beauty was not enough to distract him.