“There it is.” Ryan reached in and pulled out one of the books, titled The Shapes in our Stars. “My mother gave this to me when I was eight,” he said as he flipped through the pages. “Had me totally obsessed for a while. Even had a telescope, which I pointed out through that very window.” He soon found the page he was looking for. He placed the book in Amy’s lap and opened to a page headed Ursa Minor ( The Little Dipper).

“On Little Dipper’s forehead,” he said, “right above her blaze, she’s got a cluster of white spots that closely matches the shape of that constellation. The resemblance is uncanny; it’s almost identical.”

Amy studied the picture, an image of the night sky. In it, a trail of stars shaped into a long-handled ladle had been highlighted in yellow.

“Wow, that’s neat,” she said.

“I know, right? When it came time to think up a name, what could have been better?”

“Nothing,” she agreed. “The name is perfect.”

Ryan thumbed through the pages and gave Amy a crash course in some other constellations, focusing particularly on the brighter ones she might have a chance of spotting in the light-polluted skies above the city. Amy was listening closely and trying to take it all in—really, she was—but no amount of smiling and nodding could disguise the fact that her eyes kept sliding off the page and drifting to the inside of that box. After a while, her curiosity got the best of her and she interrupted him, just as he was talking about Sagittarius and a story about a man who had the body of a horse.

“Everything in there—it belonged to your mother?”

Ryan stopped midsentence. He looked down. “Most of it, yeah, or it’s stuff that reminds me of her.”

Amy spied a photo. “Is that her?”

“Yes.”

“May I see?”

“Sure.” He set the book aside and retrieved the framed photo. The shot was of him when he was very young, perhaps only five or six years old. He was sitting on a fence with his father and mother on either side. Horses were milling about in the background. Tall and dark-haired, his mother had one hand on her hip and the other around Ryan’s shoulders.

“She’s pretty. You’ve got her eyes.”

“Do you think so?”

“Definitely. Do you have any others?”

“Lots.”

Ryan reached for another photograph. As he handed it to Amy, he remarked that this was the last photo he had of her, that it had been taken shortly before she died. Amy held the frame with care. In this photo Ryan was sitting on the back of a horse with a rider’s cap on his head and reins in his hands. He looked much older in this one, though probably not quite a teenager. His mother was standing next to him, strands of dark hair blowing across her face.