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Leo looked around.

The room was barely wide enough for the beds and a person to walk beside them. Two cots stood end to end against the far wall. One had sagged in the middle. The other held the heap of blanket.

There was nobody on either of them.

“There used to be someone here.”

“Okay.”

“There was.”

“I hear you.”

A stone scraped against another stone.

Leo’s head snapped around.

Nate was at the opening, one hand braced on its edge. He’d set the flashlight down so that it shone into the room.

The wall was still coming apart.

Leo wanted to go to it, but then the beam caught the blanket, revealing a blue stripe along its edge.

And suddenly he remembered who had been wrapped in it.

A young man had sat on that cot, fully dressed, the blanket pulled up around his knees. He’d kept his shoes on. There had been a paper bag beside him, a shirt sticking out of the top.

Leo stared at the empty bed as more of the memory came back.

Blond hair falling into the young man’s eyes. A hand that shook as he pushed it away. A narrow face, a scatter of freckles across his nose.

Then he lifted his head.

Bright blue eyes.

Leo reached toward him before he knew he was moving.

Oh.

It was him.

The boy he’d loved. The eyes he’d remembered in the dark, the cigarette smoke, that enormous feeling he’d had nowhere to put.

Now the boy had a face.

And he was crying.

Leo couldn’t bear it. He wanted to go to him, get his arms around him, make whatever had happened stop mattering. The need was so familiar that for a moment he expected to be able to do it.

But of course he couldn’t.

An older woman crouched beside the cot, holding one of the cups from the shelf.

“No one’s coming down,” she said.

The young man—Leo could still not recall his name—was not convinced.

“But what if they do?”