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“Leo is short for Leonard now?”

“It always was. Everyone knows this. Leo is for people I like,” the ghost added, watching the fields go by. “Your mother may use it. The child with the crayons may use it. You will address me by my full name.”

“The full name I gave you.”

“The full name I chose,” Leo corrected.

Nate drove. The wipers cleared a fine mist off the glass. He should let it go. He really should.

“Okay, Leonard,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure, Leonard.”

“You don’t have to say it every time.”

“You just told me to use it, Leonard.”

“Once,” Leo said. “Now you’re trying to make me look ridiculous.”

“Noted, Leonard.”

The ghost went rigid, and Nate caught himself grinning at the road — actually grinning, at seven in the morning, on no coffee.

But he couldn’t stop.

“I’m revoking your name privileges entirely,” Leo announced.

“That’s fair, Leonard.”

Leo made a sound that the seal would have expressed by paddling both flippers wildly. Then he turned to the window and stayed there, chin up, radiating offended silence.

Nate let him have it.

The fields turned from gray to a dewy green, and the manor was still twenty minutes out when Leo drifted away from his window. Not far. An inch, maybe two, across the bench seat, the cold of him just reaching Nate’s arm.

Eight feet of tether, and he used none of it.

Nate didn’t comment.

“We’re stopping for breakfast,” he said instead. “Any objections, Leonard?”

“Several,” said Leo, and objected happily the rest of the way.

Chapter

Thirteen

The manor appeared around a bend in the road shortly before ten.

Leo saw the turret first, rising above the trees with ivy tangled around its roof. Then the east chimney, the upper windows, and finally the whole house waiting at the end of the gravel drive.

Home.

The word moved through him with such force that for a moment he forgot to complain.

Nate slowed the truck and turned onto the gravel. Weeds brushed the undercarriage. The porch came into view, as well as the foxgloves still losing their war with the weeds.