Hi @weirdo_man

You won’t be able to achieve such a result with a transparent stroke. A stroke may be transparent but won’t hide anything below itself

I can see 2 ways of doing this :

1. Use a stroke, set it to “outside” and manually pic its color so it’s the same as the one in your background


2. Use a subtract selection so you can remove the “stroke” from the rectangle below:
   
   a. Add a stroke to the top rectangle, then disconnect it (cmd+shift+O or ctrl+shift+O)
   
   b. make sure the stroke is above your rectangle
   
   c. select them (rectangle and stroke) and use a subtract union

Hope it helped