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“You were avoiding my eyes the entire time.”

It seemed Leo didn’t have anything to say to that. Odd for him not to have a comeback, but Nate decided to let the matter rest as he carried the sawhorses to the dining room.

He could get another hour of real work done before he had to figure out dinner.

He put the camera on a tripod, hoping to get some good footage. After all, the number of videos he needed to upload to finance this project was still ‘too many.’

Not a comforting thought, that.

Nate shoved it aside and hit record.

The words came out almost automatically as he started working. He was so used to narrating his workflow by now, talking to an invisible audience who’d leave silly comments on his videos. Except as he kept talking, he slowly realized he wasn’t talking to his YouTube audience.

He was talking to the ghost who floated in the doorway as if he didn’t want to get closer.

“So this is what we’ve got behind the plaster,” Nate heard himself saying. “Somebody doubled this wall. See how the new stud’s sistered to the old one? No nails, it’s just sitting there. Whoever did this was in a hurry. They did not treat your house well.”

Your house.

Nate was going to have to cut that part.

He repeated the line without the incriminating words.

The ghost by the doorway said nothing.

Nate glanced at him—because he couldn’t help himself—and then he kept working. He got the pry bar under the next section of lath and talked through what he was doing.

Only silence responded.

Nate used to think Leo’s commentary on everything was exhausting. Now he was finding the opposite to be true.

It was weird not hearing a single word about how he was ruining everything.

Still, he powered through the work, prying sections loose and stacking them until finally he ran out of wall he could pretend to care about.

He stopped the recording.

That was the moment Leo chose to speak up. “You spoke to me and then you repeated yourself because you’re going to cut that part out of the video, aren’t you? You don’t want the strangers to know about me. Why is that?”

Nate turned to him. Leo had his arms crossed, but he was finally meeting Nate’s gaze.

“I know you spent too much money on this house,” Leo said. “And you need the videos. Am I… Would the strangers stop watching if they knew about me?”

Where was this coming from? Nate studied Leo, his defensive posture. “That was your plan at the start, wasn’t it? You tried to haunt me on camera so people would be scared and not buy your house.”

“It was different, then,” Leo said. “I don’t want you to run out of money when I don’t even know what I’m guarding here.” He averted his gaze, turning toward the window instead. “For all I know, it’s just a house now and it should be used by the living. It’s not… my house.”

“Don’t.” The word came out harder than Nate meant it to.

But to hear Leo talk like that…

Leo’s stopped looking at the window. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t talk about yourself like you don’t matter.” Nate put the pry bar down. “And you know what? Haunted house videos actually make some YouTubers good money. But that isn’t what my channel is about. That’s why I cut you.” He paused, considering. “My audience would call me crazy if I didn’t. Trust me, I tried to tell people what I saw. They called me crazy. They called me a freak.”

Nate was not going back to that.

He had been getting more views since his comment section had started speculating about a corpse in the cellar. But that didn’t mean it would be a good idea to put the ghost on camera. “They like speculating,” Nate said. “As long as they can tell themselves it’s not true in the end. As long as it’s a game. But if I told them I talk to a ghost I named Leo?” Nate shrugged, trying to appear casual. “I’d turn into a carnival act.”