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Dawson. Delgado. Dietrich, Doyle, Dunn.

Nothing. The E’s gave him nothing. The F’s gave him nothing, and by the G’s, he was starting to worry. What if he was wrong about knowing? What if the name had already gone by and it had passed through him like everything passed through him, like his hands through the weeds, and he’d never⁠—

No.

Not that name. It was more important than his own. Closer to the surface.

Hargrove. Harmon. Hayes.

The window over the sink went from gray to grayer. Nate reached over at some point and turned on the kitchen light without pausing the scroll. The sandwich sat abandoned on its plate. The names went by, the M’s became the P’s became the S’s, and the dread wound tighter and tighter, because the alphabet was running out.

Talbot. Thorne. Tran.

Nothing.

Underwood.

Nothing.

Vance. Vasquez. Vogel. Walsh. Ward. Webb. Whitfield. Wright.

Nothing.

Young, Dorothy A.

Zimmerman, Frank.

The page ended.

The cursor sat there blinking at the bottom of a decade of the dead. Not one of them was the boy, and Leo stood at the end of the table, feeling the ground go out from under a theory he hadn’t known he was standing on.

Not there.

He wasn’t there.

That was good. That was good.

“Leo,” Nate said quietly.

“I want to see the rest of the names,” Leo said.

“The rest?”

“All the people who’ve died until now.”

Nate looked at him for a moment. Then he leaned back and looked at the screen as if he were working through a problem. “That’s forty-five more years,” he said. “Do you have any idea how long that’ll take?”

“A while?”

“Right.”

“It’s important,” Leo insisted. “It’s more important than anything else you have to do.”

He braced for Nate to argue.

Instead, Nate stood up.

He crossed to the counter and got the coffee maker going, and while it worked, he retrieved his sandwich from the table and ate it standing up. Fueling up more than eating, really. Then he poured the coffee and sat back down with the mug at his elbow.