Eleven months ago.

Ellie waited for dusk to come.

The last of the guests had gone, and Ellie had chosen to linger outside a while longer after she'd walked Gavin to his car. Perched on the front porch steps hugging her lanky bare knees to her chest and leaning backward as she gazed up at the sky, Ellie counted down the seconds as twilight extinguished into night. The distant blinking white light of an airplane flew overhead in silence as the last shred of daylight vanished, racing past the glittering stars that seemed to flicker in and out of existence in the darkness. She loved nights like these best, when the light of the new moon was buried behind its shadow, conceding its brilliance to the stars, so bright that she could get lost in them.

The porch lights turned on, and she could feel a cool gust of air on her back as the front door creaked open and light footsteps approached from behind. Ellie stiffened, sitting up straighter without bothering to turn around, and her mouth pressed firmly into a tight line.

"Beautiful night, isn't it?" Claire remarked as she came up beside Ellie, bracing herself against the rounded pillar as if seeking respite from a very long day. Without waiting for a response, she pointed up to the blinking light above and wondered aloud what star that might be.

"That's probably a 747."

"Odd name for a star," she mused, her eyes hazy from the alcohol.

"Maybe," Ellie replied, "but not so odd for a passenger airplane."

Ellie didn't bother to explain that most stars had numerical classifications. It was an unnecessary clarification since it was bound to lead to more inane conversation. Instead, she waited for Claire to lose interest as the plane disappeared in the distance, expecting her to retreat back inside the house, and she was so certain she would as silence settled between them. Her eyelids looked heavy with sleep, and her arms were so weary and weak that she barely clung on to that pillar. But the minutes lapsed, dragging on, and Claire still conveyed no inclination to leave.

"You and your brother are so much alike," she noted, eclipsing the silence.

"I think the alcohol has affected your vision," was Ellie's flat reply as she nudged a pebble with the toe of her shoe on the concrete walkway.

"I don't mean that," Claire insisted, seemingly unaware of Ellie's indifference. "You obsess over the stars the way he used to. Ephraim was always going on about them too when we were kids. He even named one after me for my seventeenth birthday." There was the slightest slur in her speech, and Ellie wondered just how much alcohol Claire had to drink that night.

"I remember. He was always such a sappy romantic."

Claire cocked her head against the pillar and stared up at the sky, searching for the obscure star that bore her name. But she wouldn't find it that night, or any other night for that matter. It was as if the star had been completely blotted from existence.

"It was such a sweet gesture," Claire uttered somberly, "A very Ephraim thing for him to do."

"Yeah." It was a perfunctory response, but she wondered what Claire was implying. "I bet Maren was pretty jealous."

Ellie hadn't quite intended the snark that came spilling out of her with her last remark, and she could fathom even less why she'd said it in the first place, but one glance in Claire's direction and Ellie knew that she had not heard her utterance, or at the very least had not given it any regard.

"I hated it so much."

There was a firmness to Claire's mouth that Ellie had not expected. And unreadable eyes that had fixed themselves upon the brightest of stars. Claire looked like she had more to say, but, whatever that might have been, it died before an utterance was made.

Rubbing the back of her neck, Ellie turned away. A twinge of hesitation pulled at her insides, and as much as she did not want to continue their conversation, as much as she had wanted Claire to leave her alone, she was compelled to pry.

"Why did you hate it? Isn't that normally the sort of thing that girls like?"

It certainly had seemed to be the case with the girls she went to school with. Girls who preoccupied their time with fingernail polish and hair products and honed their makeup application skills with YouTube video tutorials. All that just to look like pretty little statues on the sidelines as they sought admiration and validation, desperate for anyone to take notice. And Claire was easily the prettiest of all the statues.

"Maybe I'm not normal then," Claire confessed, and Ellie bit back the caustic retort that lingered on the tip of her tongue. "A normal girl might not feel so burdened. But I was. It was, it was like I was being set up with all these ideas he had in his head, you know? Expectations I could never live up to, on a pedestal that was so ridiculously high."

"Oh."

"I do miss the stars, though."

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There was a nostalgic timbre to her voice, and Ellie wondered what she meant by that. Something about her words struck her with a loneliness she did not anticipate.

Ellie said nothing more. She couldn't say anything more. Her sister-in-law had just drunkenly poured out a bit of her heart, and Ellie could not bring herself to judge her for it. More than that, she got the impression that Claire was mostly speaking to herself, and Ellie had been something akin to an unintended witness of her admission. Choosing to sit in silence as crickets swelled the night with their endless chirps, her eyes remained fixed on the stars above although she hardly took notice of them anymore. Claire had surprised her in a way that Ellie had not expected, so much so that she had not noticed when Claire finally disappeared back into the house and turned the lights off behind her.

But she never was like those girls, Ellie hated to admit to herself. Claire wasn't so frivolous or vain to be lumped together with the girls Ellie remembered from high school, or the girls on campus who made spectacles of themselves at the weekly parties thrown by Gavin's fraternity. Claire had never sought the spotlight, or the veneration imposed by shallow peers, but somehow it always found her anyway.

She misses the stars, Ellie mused, leaning her back flat against the wooden floor of the front porch and closing her eyes. For some reason she remembered the unfinished Dobsonian telescope collecting dust in her parents' garage. It was a project Ellie had started years ago in response to her mother's second diagnosis of cancer, and she abandoned it shortly after when the illness took away her only reason to finish it. Her mother would never get to see the galaxies Ellie had promised her, and the telescope parts she had collected and labored over were buried in forgotten corners of the garage.

"I see right through you," the night whispered, stirring her awake, and something like shame swelled inside her with her sharp intake of breath.

Ellie couldn't remember falling asleep on the porch, or the fleeting memory that crept into her dream during her brief nap, but she caught a piece of it as she woke before it dissipated into fog. Disembodied words that meant little without context but pressed into her chest like a vice. She was left with a residual uneasiness, one that persisted even when she stumbled over Claire's sleeping form on the floor after she went back inside the house.

"Jesus, what are you doing there?" Ellie hissed above a whisper as she turned on the living room light. Claire lay curled on the Persian rug, her head pressed against the foot of the leather recliner, and Ephraim was sprawled out on the sofa with a half empty beer bottle wedged upright between his legs and blue icing smudged on his chin.

"So bright," he groaned, sliding a hand over his face, barely awake at all.

"I can't believe these are my adult role models," Ellie grumbled softly, picking up the empty beer bottles and dumping them in the recycling bin. She quickly cleared away the dirty plates into the dishwasher and covered the half-eaten birthday cake before tucking it into the fridge. It took longer to sort through the crumbled wrapping paper and empty gift bags, and it gave her pause when she came across the cheap lip gloss she had gifted Claire before finally casting it onto the pile of opened gifts on the kitchen counter.

"Go to bed," Ellie urged as she popped her head into the living room once more after she was done. "You guys are gonna feel like crap in the morning if you spend the night here."

If they heard her, Ephraim and Claire certainly didn't show it, and Ellie shrugged before she turned off the lights and headed to her room, but she hadn't reached her room before she reluctantly turned around and marched back into the living room.

"Alright, up," Ellie commanded as she coaxed Claire off the floor. Taking her hand, Ellie leaned under Claire like a crutch, and pulled her up to her feet.

"Hold onto me and watch your step," Ellie cautioned, clutching tighter as she guided Claire through the hallway and to her bedroom. She could smell liquor on her breath, and it was surprisingly cinnamony and sweet.

"Bed?" Claire mumbled, clasping her fingers over Ellie's shirt as she sought her balance. Once they made it to the master bedroom, Ellie eased Claire into her bed and helped her out of jeans, but moments later Claire was bent over the toilet in tears, heaving and gagging as she expelled the toxics from her body. Ellie waited, standing under the door frame, ready with a glass of tap water as she observed the woman before her with curious interest. Claire, who was usually so meticulously kempt and so perfectly composed, was a crumbled and disheveled mess. There was nothing pristine about her appearance, and somehow, she seemed the better for it.

Claire managed to gulp down half the glass of water, triggering a second wave of nausea and vomiting, and Ellie had to coax a leery Claire into finishing the second half by holding the glass to her lips, even as Claire continued to push it away. She was weaker than before, following her second round, and Ellie half carried her back to bed, her legs trembling beneath her as she bore both their combined weight across the floor. Claire closed her eyes before her head hit her pillow, and Ellie pulled off her sweater and unbuttoned her vomit-splattered blouse, gingerly tugging it off, leaving only a modest camisole beneath.

What do the stars mean to you? She wondered, remembering that funny feeling at the pit of her stomach several New Year's ago. There had been streamers and confetti, and bottomless flutes of champagne. And the same aching from back then throttled in her chest, drawing her closer to unfettered truths. What do you see in those stars?

In that moment, Ellie wanted to reach inside her and touch that part of her that Ephraim had forgotten. She wanted to give her a piece of those stars, and smother the loneliness that dwelled inside her eyes, harnessed within the darks of her irises.

"I see you," Ellie breathed softly, pressing a consoling hand to Claire's forehead as tears spilled freely from her weathered eyes and down her cheeks. Claire had always been a sorry drunk, bad at holding her liquor and quick to cry, sometimes for no reason at all, but Ellie couldn't imagine not crying after an ordeal like hers. Claire was sure to be dealing with a massive hangover in the morning.

For all her glitter and shine, Claire was so painfully flawed, so terribly human, and so very small. Still, there was something about her that drew Ellie in, compelling her to scrutinize all her perfect imperfections.

"You see me?" Claire raised a hand as if attempting to reach for Ellie, but in her exhaustion, she let it fall limp beside her, exhaling deeply and giving in to her body's demand for rest.

"I see you," Ellie assured her. For the first time, she truly did.

And as she watched her sleep from the bedroom door, not quite ready to let the moment end, Ellie dared to wonder aloud to herself, "Do you see me too?"