Excerpt One | Excerpt Two

Mike barreled his truck down the narrow dirt road, a banner of thick tan dust lofting in its wake. He roared into a sharp left turn, trying to outrun the disillusionment he'd seen in Avery's eyes when he dropped her off at the house.

She'd accused him of keeping Fiona's return to Larkin from her. And of course, he had.

He'd been installing bookcases in the Provost's office at Larkin University when he glanced out the window and saw Fiona striding across the quad. Or at least he'd thought it was Fiona. He hadn't expected that his daughter would ever dye her hair the color of grape Koolaid. Or that his daughter would be seen in a tee-shirt so short and tight it looked spray-painted on.

Mike tromped on the gas peddle. The truck fish-tailed, sending up another plume of dust.

He hadn't wanted it to be Fiona that day at the college, but as she climbed the Ad Building's steps, he'd seen her up close. He could tell by the square of her shoulders and the set of her head that Fee hadn't changed. She was exactly what she'd always been: a headstrong girl so bent on getting what she wanted that she didn't care what her thoughtlessness or her ambition did to anyone else. He and Avery were the ones who'd been torn apart and transformed by her leaving—not Fee herself.

Right then, he'd decided that telling Avery about Fiona being back in Larkin couldn't bring anything but heartache. His wife had been devastated by the note Fee left. He'd watched hope flicker in Avery's eyes every time she got a phone call or a three line e-mail from their daughter—and he'd watched that hope die when Fee once again fell silent.

He'd held Avery weeping in his arms more nights than he could count, but he was helpless against her grief. He was far too angry at his daughter to give Avery the comfort she needed.

He'd worked so hard to build a safe, strong life for his family. They'd had their moments of triumph and tragedy; every family did. But for more than twenty years the life he'd made with Avery had come very near to being perfect. Then, Fee had run away and ruined everything.

In leaving the way she had, Fee had betrayed both Avery and him. She'd driven a wedge between them in a way nothing else ever could. Every word he and Avery exchanged on the subject of their daughter threatened the solidity of their marriage. Finally Mike refused to discuss Fiona at all, and once he stopped, he and Avery had less and less to say to each other.

Especially today.

Avery had glared across the truck at him, her sage-green eyes iced with accusation. "You knew Fiona was back in Larkin, didn't you?"

Mike hadn't been able to defend himself or explain he'd done what he thought was best. So he'd gunned the Silverado's engine and peeled out of the Food-4-Less parking lot like a rowdy teenager. They'd made the ten-minute ride back to the house in absolute silence: with Avery staring fixedly ahead and Mike's guts boiling. He still hadn't figured out what to say to her when they pulled into the driveway, so once she got out of the truck and slammed the door behind her, he bolted for the farm.

Now, as he dipped down the road into the lush, tree-shaded valley cut by Little Apple Creek, he passed the rambling farmhouse that had sheltered the Montgomery clan for four generations. His brother Ted's truck was parked by the back door, but Mike was too intent on getting where he was going do more than slow down.

The Silverado's wheels spit gravel as he climbed the grade that rose behind the house. Not five minutes later, he parked beside a tall, barn-red shed at the top of the hill. He clambered out of the cab, braced his hands against his knees, and sucked in air as if he'd run, not driven, all the way from town.

"Jesus!" he gasped, not sure if the word was a prayer or a curse.

He closed his eyes and stood wavering. He hadn't seen Fiona close up that day on the quad. He hadn't felt her gaze touch him, hadn't seen it ice over and slide away. She'd dismissed him this afternoon as if he was nothing, as if the time they'd spent together when she was growing up meant nothing. As if the plans they'd made for her future meant nothing.

God knows, he'd worked so hard to make a life with Avery and Fiona. He thought he'd sited the future he'd hoped for on solid ground. He thought he'd laid down a firm foundation and built a life worthy of his family. He'd poured everything he had into doing that, thinking it would last forever. But it hadn't lasted.

Bitterness burned beneath his breastbone. First Fiona had run away. Then Avery had turned away from him. Now Fiona’s return was threatening all he had. All he had left.

Mike stood hunched-over until his hands stopped shaking, and he caught his breath. Then, he pushed resolutely upright and headed toward the stout, metal-banded door at the back of the shed. He unclipped the wad of keys from his belt and twisted one of them it in the padlock. With a creek he pushed open the door to the observatory, only place he still felt completely himself.

It was pitch black inside, the air cool and a little stale with being shut up. He stepped into the dark, flipped on both the computer and exhaust fan, then reached up and unfastened the row of safety latches that held the roof to the walls. He grabbed one of the aluminum struts and pushed it hard. To the grumbling accompaniment of a dozen casters, he rolled the corrugated top of the shed backward, opening the observatory to the autumn sky.

From the highest point on the Montgomery farm, Mike savored the subtle beauty of eastern Kansas. Striped cornfields lay gilded by the last raking light of sunset. Hay shorn and gathered into shaggy bales squatted on the hilly fields like herds of grazing mastodons. Squares of earth lay harrowed and turned, ready to be sown with winter wheat.

Mike raised his gaze from the rich, opened soil to the clear, darkening sky, and finally to the telescope that would allow him to probe the heaven’s secrets.

He went about the preparations for viewing with the ease of long practice. While he waited for the temperature of the air inside and outside his small observatory to equalize, he climbed the rolling ladder and carefully removed the dust cap from his big sixteen inch Newtonian reflector telescope. He did the same with the smaller finder scope which was attached along the side. Finder scopes were used to sight the particular object the astronomer meant to study before focusing the larger scope on a narrower field of view.

Mike carefully cleaned the eyepieces on both the telescopes, then swung the whole thing around to sight on one of the easy-to-see guide stars just becoming visible as the sky shifted from turquoise to navy blue.

Once he'd checked the alignment between the smaller and larger telescopes, Mike prepared the computer on the battered desk for tonight's observing run. He double-checked the connections between the CCD—the charged-coupled device—camera mounted on the larger scope and the program that would record, store, and eventually print whatever images he made.

Odd as it seemed, working in the observatory he and his daughter had built together was the single thing that settled the turmoil inside him.

Thinking back, Mike remembered the exact moment when Fee fell in love with the stars. She was eight and the two of them had been "camping out"—sleeping in their sleeping bags in the back yard—when she pointed to a slash of light streaking across the midnight sky.

"What was that, Daddy?" she'd asked him.

"A falling star," he'd answered.

"So what makes stars fall?"

Fee had always been so full of questions that Mike had to work to stay ahead of her. Back then, he hadn't been able to recognize more in the sky than the moon and the Big Dipper.

"I don't know," he'd been forced to admit. "They just do sometimes."

"But why do they?" she persisted, being bright and curious—and unrelenting.

Being Fee.

"We'll look it up tomorrow," he'd promised her.

And they had. What they'd seen wasn't a falling star; it was a meteoroid burning up in the earth's atmosphere. What they also discovered was that they'd been out during the Perseid Meteor Shower, a yearly occurrence that happened when the earth's orbit passed through the tail of a comet.

"So what's a comet?" Fiona wanted to know. That had been the beginning of his daughter's obsession with astronomy.

And his own.

In the next few months they'd poured over every astronomy book in Larkin's town library. They'd driven to Kansas City and seen a show at the Planetarium and visited the observatory in Topeka. When her grandfather had heard about Fiona's burgeoning interest in astronomy, Jonathan Parrish had used his position as president of Larkin University to arrange for them to spend an evening with the science department's telescope and one of the grad students.

Those experiences had whetted Fee's appetite, so for her next birthday Mike bought her a telescope. That telescope led not only to a series of prizewinning science projects, but to contact with other amateur astronomers. He and Fee had gone to star parties all over the Midwest, observing at everything from the rings of Saturn to the elusive Horsehead Nebula.

Eventually the two of them started making plans to build their own observatory, and Fee had decided to pursue a degree in Astronomy. Of course, that all happened before Fee got so involved with Jared Hightower and his rock band.

Now that it was full dark, Mike slewed the telescope toward a familiar piece of sky. He was up on the ladder working to refine the focus when he heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel drive.

A moment later his brother's voice echoed up to him. "Can I talk to you a minute, Mike? It's not like those stars are going anywhere."

Mike grimaced. He wanted so much to be alone right now. He wanted to forget about everything but the pinpricks of light that originated in galaxies millions of miles away. He wanted to lose himself in the cosmos.

"Come ahead," he called back in spite of himself.

Ted's tread was ever so slightly unsteady as he came into the observatory.

"Woo-ee!" he hooted bracing one hand against the wall and staring upward. "The stars are sure out tonight! How come they're so much clearer here than down at the house?"

Ted asked that question every time he came up to the observatory.

Mike gave him his standard answer. "There isn't any light pollution to wash them out."

Ted nodded as if he was actually listening. "You looking at anything in particular?"

"I thought I'd start by looking in on Mars. Just give me a minute to finish setting things up, and you can have a look."

"Nah!" Ted backed off, shaking his head. "How come you're here on a Sunday night? Don't you have to work in the morning?"

"I've got some data to collect," Mike hedged. He wasn't about to admit he and Avery had argued, that he was here cooling off. Or hiding out.

He especially wasn't going to admit that to his brother.

"It's not like you to be home on Sunday night, either," Mike observed. "Didn't you have the kids today?"

Ted dipped his head. "Nancy wanted them dropped off early."

Which had given Ted the chance to stop for a beer—or probably a couple of beers—between Nancy's folks' in Lenexa and home. He had that sour, yeastiness about him, a smell Mike had learned to recognize—and hate—in childhood.

"Well, I'm glad you're here," Ted went on. "There's something I've been wanting to talk to you about."

Immediately Mike's guard went up. If his brother had sought him out, it was because he wanted something. He braced his palms against the cement pier the telescope was mounted on and tried not to say anything judgmental.

He did anyway. "So what kind of trouble are you in now?"

"Aw, Mike!" Ted protested. "How come you always have to put it like that?"

Mike couldn't pretend he didn't know what his brother meant. "Because that's how it almost always is."

It was this time, too. It took Ted awhile to get around to it, but he finally admitted why he'd come.

"I've got taxes to pay on the farm by the end of the month," Ted told him. "What with the support I'm giving Nancy and all, I'm having a little trouble keeping up. Janice couldn't spare anything on account of Rich being cut-back at work, but Ma gave me—"

"Ma gave you?" Mike roared.

Their mother lived in a one bedroom apartment in Kansas City, not much more than a block from their sister's house. She just barely made ends meet with her social security check and what he and Janice managed to add to it.

"Ma doesn't have the money to bail you out of this!" he all but growled at Ted. "You've got no business asking her!"

"She doesn't want us to lose the farm," Ted defended himself. "It being the Montgomery home place and all."

As if the memories they'd made here were ones any of them would want to cherish.

"I swear, Mike, it's the last time I'll ever ask you . . . "

Mike took a breath, knowing he'd have to help, knowing he couldn't let Ted pester their mother. Knowing with Ted there'd never be a "last time."

"How long have you let this slide?"

Ted shifted his shoulders the way he did when he was trying to avoid something unpleasant. "A couple months is all," he hedged. "When Nancy comes back with the kids, I'll be able to manage better."

Mike wished he believed Nancy and the kids were coming back to the farm. Or that Ted would sprout a sense of responsibility. Or stop drinking.

But no matter how much Ted was deluding himself about the future, Mike couldn't let him lose the farm. He might not have had the happiest childhood here, but the eighty acres left of the homestead their great-grandfather settled had given all of them space and quiet and fields to roam.

Besides, Mike couldn't give up the observatory; it was his last tangible link to his daughter.

"So how much money do you need?" he asked his brother.

Ted ducked his head. "About thirty-five hundred would catch us up."

Mike imagined he could hear a sneer in Ted's voice, like he knew he'd won. His only satisfaction came in making Ted wait for the capitulation.

"I've got my checkbook in the truck," he finally said.

Ted followed him outside and waited as Mike dug his checkbook out of the glove compartment. He wrote the check by the light of one of his cherry-red flashlights and handed it over to Ted begrudgingly.

"Thanks," Ted said, but Mike heard no gratitude in his tone. They'd played these roles too long for him to expect it.

It was the pattern they'd perfected in childhood. Mike was the dutiful older brother, cleaning up whatever mess Ted made, covering for him with their mother, the teachers at school, and even once with the sheriff. Ted was the screw-up, forever resentful of Mike's help, but dependent on it anyway.

Mike reached through the truck window and shoved the checkbook back into the glove box. He turned back to his brother, as aggravate with himself as he was with Ted.

"You need anything else?"

Ted shook his head and headed down the road toward the house. Mike watched him go, seeing how lost and displaced Ted seemed, how alone and disconnected. For the first time in years, Mike understood that feeling.