My Husband Canceled The Stars And Put Our Projector Up For Sale

Preston announced our ruin while I was fixing a hole shaped like a rabbit bite.

I had spread the dome across our Orlando workshop floor. The fan was off. Without air, our traveling planetarium looked like a heap of dark laundry.

I was twenty-eight, a mixed-race Black and Puerto Rican woman with brown skin, dark curls tied in a scarf, and a small white scar across my left eyebrow.

My job was mobile-planetarium operator. I drove the van, checked the blower, set up the projector, and gave children a night sky inside school gyms. I also repaired punctures with star-shaped patches I cut myself.

“We’re bankrupt,” Preston said.

My scissors stopped.

At thirty-two, Preston was a tall white American man with sandy hair, pale blue eyes, and a smile that made strangers lean closer.

He used that smile on school boards and festival crowds. At home, he mostly used it when he wanted me to stop asking something.

“What does bankrupt mean?” I asked. “Did you file something?”

“It means there’s no money, Talia.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

He put his phone facedown on a workbench.

“I canceled the school visits. All twelve. We can’t keep pretending.”

Outside, afternoon rain rattled the metal awning. Inside, I could hear water ticking into the bucket by our loading door.

“Those schools paid,” I said.

“Expenses happened.”

“Which expenses?”

“You want a spreadsheet while our life falls apart?”

He said it like I had requested table flowers at a funeral.

Our business was called Lantern Sky. I owned sixty percent. Preston owned forty. We had started it three years earlier with my savings, a small equipment loan, and his gift for making every meeting feel like an opening night.

I ran the shows. He promoted them.

Lately, he had described that arrangement as his business and my little star room.

“We collected thirty-eight thousand four hundred dollars for those visits,” I said.

He looked at me then.

“Gross,” he said. “You don’t understand gross.”

I set the scissors down.

“I understand twelve schools at thirty-two hundred each.”

His phone lit up. Wren.

Wren Alder was the event planner he had hired in March. She wore cream jackets to outdoor festivals and never seemed to sweat. Preston had said she was merely helping us reach bigger clients.

“I’m staying with Wren,” he said.

I watched rain run down the loading-door glass.

“For tonight?”

“For a while. Don’t make it ugly.”

He reached for my shoulder. I stepped back before his hand landed.

For a second, his smile went away.

“You get upset, then you go quiet,” he said. “That’s why I had to handle things.”

He picked up the overnight bag I had not noticed behind his legs.

“The projector buyer comes tomorrow. Eleven. Leave the side door unlocked.”

Our projector had cost twenty-six thousand dollars. It lived in a padded flight case with a brass tag I had riveted on myself.

“You can’t sell that alone.”

“I’m trying to save us from debt.”

He left before I could ask whose debt.

I stayed on the floor until the rain eased. Then I pressed a silver star over the puncture and held it flat with my thumb.

Air always found the place you failed to seal.

My phone rang.

“Talia,” Zuri Coleman said, “tell me this cancellation is a bad attachment.”

Zuri was thirty-one, a Black American woman and school science coordinator who could build a solar oven from a pizza box and win an argument with a room full of principals.

Her students had spent weeks making paper constellations.

“I’m checking it,” I said.

“He wrote that refunds were already arranged. Our office has nothing.”

“Please forward the email.”

“Are you all right?”

I looked at the bare hook where Preston’s keys had hung.

“I need the email first.”

“You’ll have it. And those kids are getting their sky.”

After we hung up, I opened the gray file cabinet beneath my glue shelf.

Preston had laughed when I bought it.

“Nobody keeps paper anymore, Moon Lady.”

I had kept our company agreement, equipment receipts, and every school contract. Behind them sat a blue folder marked ORIGINAL PAYOUT MANDATE.

It held the form we had both signed when we opened our account with Harbor Ledger, our payment processor. Any change to the payout destination required both owners’ approval.

My separate reserve-account records were clipped behind it.

Preston had never asked what those clips held. He thought my folders were another kind of patch kit.

I logged into the processor portal using my own owner account.

The first alert said our payout destination had changed nineteen days earlier.

I clicked the attached authorization.

At the bottom was my name in a smooth, looping signature.

I printed the page and laid it beside the original.

Someone had signed for me.