But Irene stared out at the sky, the tumultuous blue of the clouds and the distant, glittering stars, and thought of the future. Perhaps there was just this. The curved, sickle moon. The emptiness of the sky. Her parents, both their children gone for college, a house in Santa Clara that was too big for the two of them. All that Irene had to be. Alex Huang and everything Irene did not know. One month, and they would be elsewhere.
