“Found it!”
Kou looked up from the telescope and shouted it, a good three “get inside now”s too late. Nana was used to that voice by now. Used to it, sure, but the rooftop at dusk was still freezing.
“It’s Grandma. Look, right there. There’s a new light in the town across the sky. She lit it for us, I know it.”
Kou was pointing at the same distant star town as always. It sat so far off that its light took seven years to arrive. Which meant what they were seeing now was the town as it had been seven years ago. Grandma had moved there exactly three years back.
“Kou.” Nana sighed. “That’s seven-year-old light. It left before Grandma ever got to that town. It can’t just switch on now.”
“Then why’d it show up today, of all days?”
“It didn’t show up. You’re only noticing it today.”
Kou’s mouth twisted into a pout. Once this kid latched onto an idea, nothing could shake it loose. Their parents always joked he got that from Grandma.
“Prove it, then.”
Grudgingly, Nana went down the stairs and peeled a photo off the kitchen fridge — the one stuck at the very edge, taken the night before Grandma moved, up here on this same roof with everyone crowded in. In the background, tiny, was the town across the sky.
The two of them stood by the telescope and held the photo up to the lamp.
Right there, in the corner of a picture taken three years ago, was the exact spot Kou swore held a “new light.” The star was already in it. And the light captured in that photo was itself far older still — light that had left long before the photo was even taken. Same place. Same brightness. Already there.
”…It’s in the photo.” Kou’s voice deflated.
“Told you. It’s been there the whole time. You just felt like you discovered it today.”
Nana felt a small, petty flicker of victory and flipped the photo over — no real reason, just a habit of the hands.
There was writing on the back. Grandma’s handwriting, blocky as ever.
When this star sits on the kitchen windowsill, start dinner. Nana — make sure Kou eats first.
The two of them went quiet for a while.
What Kou had wanted, probably, was some private message crossing all that distance just for him. And here it was: the signal he’d spent so long scanning the sky for had already been written on the back of a photograph, the very night it was taken — seven years before it ever reached him. And what it said wasn’t cosmic at all. Just a chore. Use the star as a dinner timer. Even from a star that far away, Grandma was still running their evenings.
Kou glanced down, almost without meaning to, at the kitchen below the window. Nana followed his eyes.
The star was just settling onto the kitchen windowsill. Seven-year-old light, landing softly on the wooden sash, exactly the way Grandma’s handwriting — written three years after she’d left — said it would.
Nana stood up. Grudgingly, with a put-upon sigh, but she stood up all the same.
”…Feed him first, huh.”
She went down to the kitchen, rinsed the rice, set it on the burner, and pulled out two bowls. She put the fuller one in front of Kou.