"Please, Mom, stop.""What have you done?""No! My mom's picture!"By the time I crossed the mudroom and reached the patio, the canvas case was collapsing into itself inside our steel fire pit. The notebooks had already curled black at the edges. So had the constellation atlas that had belonged to Hannah, Owen's mother—the one filled with her handwriting in the margins and tiny circles around the stars she had once promised to show him.Rebecca stood beside the flames as though she were waiting for a contractor to finish hauling away debris. She told us we had forty-five minutes to disappear from her house.What she had apparently forgotten while standing on the stone patio she considered hers was that the county records contained two names on that property deed.Some endings begin so quietly that you only recognize them after something is already burning.That afternoon, it began with smoke drifting through an open kitchen window while I was rinsing a French press. Not Owen calling, not the patio door sliding shut—smoke. An ugly chemical smell from coated fabric and paper, the kind that makes your nervous system understand danger several seconds before your thoughts catch up.I put the glass carafe on the counter and walked outside.What I saw there has returned to me in pieces ever since: the hard blue sky, the sprinkler clicking somewhere beyond the fence, Rebecca's bare feet on the warm pavers, and the fire pit glowing orange beneath a column of dark smoke. She had her shoulders squared and her arms locked across her chest. She wasn't looking at the flames like someone shocked by what she had done; she was studying them with the calm satisfaction of someone watching clutter being removed.Owen stood a few feet away. He was thirteen, tall for his age, and still awkward about what to do with the extra inches he had gained that year. His face was dry, but the skin around his eyes was swollen; whatever crying had happened had happened before I arrived.I knew the case inside the fire before I saw the brass telescope patch stitched to its side: dark green canvas, one leather handle, a stain from the night Owen had dropped hot chocolate on it during a meteor shower in October—his field case. Inside had been three observation journals, a battered planisphere, two library books, a mechanical pencil set he had saved allowance money to buy, and the old star atlas Hannah had used in college.Owen had asked me only four days earlier if he could bring the atlas to science club because his teacher wanted everyone to show something that explained why they cared about their project. I had almost told him it was too precious to take out of the house. Then I remembered that precious things are supposed to mean something while you still have them. So, I had said yes.