The astronaut removed her helmet long before mission control said it was safe. Every child in the village knew the story because Aunt Clara insisted on telling it every winter. "It wasn't bravery," she'd say. "It was curiosity." When Clara died at ninety-eight, nobody expected to inherit much beyond the tiny farmhouse and a lifetime of peculiar tales. My sister found the box beneath the floorboards. Inside were photographs. Not printed. Developed. Each showed the same woman in a spacesuit standing beneath unfamiliar constellations. The dates stretched back a hundred and twenty years. The woman never aged. We laughed at first, convinced Clara had collected props from old films. Then we noticed something. The face inside the helmet was unmistakably ours. My mother's eyes. My grandmother's smile. My own crooked nose. The final envelope contained a letter. "Our family has always mistaken memory for inheritance. Some things are passed through blood. Others are passed through time. Don't spend your life trying to convince anyone. Live well instead." There was no signature. We hired experts. The paper was authentic. The photographs were impossible to fake. No one could explain them. Eventually my sister stopped researching. I almost did too. Sometimes I still look up at the stars and wonder whether our family tree has roots planted somewhere much farther away than Earth. It's an absurd thought. But not nearly as absurd as pretending I never opened that box. In the end, the truth turned out to be much quieter than she expected.