The night stretched wide, the sky a vast canvas of ink and silver. The air was warm but still, carrying the scent of cut grass and the distant hush of the trees. It was the kind of night that made the world feel weightless, untethered from time.

Diana lay beside her grandmother in the grass, her hands folded over her stomach, eyes tracing the sky. The stars were steady above them, countless and unblinking. The vastness made her feel small, but not in a way that frightened her. It was comforting, the thought that the sky had been here long before her and would be here long after.

Her grandmother’s breath was slow, unhurried. “You see that one?” she asked, lifting a hand, a single finger pointing north.

Diana followed her gesture, scanning the night, searching for the right pinpoint of light among the thousands.

“The bright one, just above the trees.”

There. A pale blue glimmer, sharper than the others, its glow distinct even among the countless specks scattered across the black.

“That’s Vega,” her grandmother said. “Part of the Summer Triangle.”

Diana frowned slightly. “It doesn’t look like a triangle.”

Her grandmother chuckled, a quiet sound against the vastness of the night. “You have to see the lines between them. Altair, Deneb, Vega—three stars, three points in the sky.”

Diana narrowed her eyes, connecting them in her mind, drawing invisible lines between them. Slowly, the shape emerged. Imperfect, uneven, but there.

Her grandmother let her hand fall back into the grass, fingers brushing the earth. “That light left Vega a long time ago.”

Diana turned her head slightly, studying the wrinkles around her grandmother’s eyes, the way her face had softened with age. “How long?”

Her grandmother exhaled, slow and steady. “I was your mother’s age when that light first left that star,” she said. “And your mother was about your age.”

Diana blinked, letting that settle.

She turned back to Vega. The light had been moving toward them all this time—before she was born, before her mother was grown. It had crossed a distance she couldn’t begin to comprehend, traveling in a straight line through emptiness, unchanged, unaffected, never slowing.

“So what we’re seeing now… isn’t really real?” she asked.

Her grandmother smiled, tilting her head slightly. “It was real. But not now. We’re looking at the past.”

Diana stared harder at the star, as if that would change something. But it was still there, shining as steadily as before. It looked as if it had always been there. Fixed. Constant.

The thought unsettled her. That something could be gone, and she wouldn’t know. That it could have burned out years ago, and they would still see its light, still believe it was there.