So that little girl grew and grew, watching her dad on TV, but getting really mad at him. One day, when she was seventeen years old, she went out east to look at colleges with her mom. She asked her dad if they could get lunch. She was going to tell him everything she thought—that he had been a bad dad her whole life, and that she didn’t understand why he acted that way, but that she loved him and wanted to give him another chance. They met up in his office, but after she’d been there for less than a minute, someone knocked on door. The New York Times was on the phone and needed a quote about some new black hole images. Dr. Leo Lacamoire left, and the little girl—not a little girl anymore, a teenage girl—had to wait and wait and wait. And while she waited, she got even angrier. Because she was being very nice giving him a chance, and he was taking advantage of her. So she saw a fancy telescope behind his desk, and a case next to it, and she just snapped. She stole that telescope and ran out the door.

Dr. Leo Lacamoire called her and called her, but she wouldn’t answer the phone. She waited for the cops to show up at her door and demand the telescope back, but they never did.

Every summer, she and Trish went to a town called Moose Junction for a week. That summer was going to be the town’s hundredth-birthday celebration, one that would include the creation of a time capsule, she’d heard. And that’s when Lyra Lacamoire had an idea: an idea that snuck into her heart and spun a web around a secret.

She hated that stupid telescope. Every time she looked at it, she thought of her mean dad who loved his newsletter subscribers more than he loved her. And so when the town created the time capsule that summer, she did the most horrible thing she could think of—she buried that telescope right down in it, so that nobody could ever find it. It would never be used—it would gather dust, buried deep in the ground.

Eighteen years later, that little girl was thirty-five years old. She had not talked to her dad since. But she was very, very sick. She had lung cancer, even though she’d never smoked one cigarette. She was thinking about her life and her greatest mistake: stealing that telescope from a man who simply didn’t know how to love people the way he loved planets. She called her father, who had been trying to track her down for years, and told him everything.

But Dr. Leo Lacamoire, PhD, had learned so much in those years, and not just about gamma-ray bursts. He had seen so much of the galaxy that he had begun to feel small: so small, like a dot in the huge landscape of the world. He had thought that the more he knew, the more important he would become, but with all the speeches and awards and TV appearances, he had realized that the opposite was true. The more he knew, the sadder he was. He was no longer Leo, the guy who loved the stars and research and a pretty girl from Wisconsin. He was Dr. Lacamoire, and that person felt entirely different. When he filmed his Netflix special, he came home at night to a sad, empty hotel room and had vending machine candy for dinner. That can make anyone reevaluate their life choices.