Page 140

Leo prompted him with a raised eyebrow.

“I don’t want to send you away. From your house.” A breath. “From me.”

There was the honest answer, sitting between them.

And Nate felt like he needed to fill the silence, to keep talking. “I’m not doing that,” he said. “Unless you want to go. If you tell me you want Mom, I’ll call her and we’ll find a vessel for you and all, and I won’t say a word about it. But you’d have to tell me you want it.”

Leo looked at him. Leo looked at him for a long moment, measuring Nate, making Nate wonder what exactly he was seeing.

The truth that was starting to build inside of Nate?

Everything he wasn’t saying?

That his brother was right to worry because Nate was making terrible choices on behalf of a ghost?

Except Leo was more than ‘a ghost,’ and Jonah would never understand, could never understand. He literally couldn’t see what Nate saw.

“I would never tell you to send me away,” Leo said finally.

Something in Nate’s chest let go. He hadn’t known it was holding on.

“Okay,” he said.

“Yeah.” Leo nodded.

Nate took another breath, and then he walked to the door.

His whole body wanted out — out of the kitchen, out of reach of the thing on the counter and all the calls that might still be coming. When he was a kid, on the nights the house got too loud, he used to climb out his window onto the porch roof and lie there until the sky sorted him out. The stars didn’t judge.

The stars didn’t need him to be anything.

“Come on,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“Up.”

He took the stairs. Leo followed, past the second floor, up the narrow steps to the turret. At the door, Nate felt him stop.

Nate didn’t comment. He crossed the room and shoved at the window sash until it opened. The night air came in cold and smelling of the garden.

Behind him, Leo floated into the room.

Nate sat down under the window with his back against the wall. Then he gave up on dignity and lay down flat on the floorboards, hands behind his head. Through the open window the sky was dark and clear.

“What are you doing?” Leo asked.

“Looking at the stars.”

“Why?”

“It’s what I do when my family gets to be too much.” He kept his eyes on the window. “I used to climb onto the porch roof and stare up and wonder.”

“Wonder about what?”

Nate glanced at Leo. “Human lives are so short, and the lives of stars are so long. Every ghost I’ve ever met, no matter when they lived or how old they are, they’ve probably looked up at the same sky. There’s something beautiful about that.”

For a moment Leo stood over him, an inch off the floor, frowning down like he was still trying to puzzle Nate out.