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Leo’s gaze drifted out the window, where the morning light was spilling over the yard and the drive. “He could be alive.”

Nate set his mug down. “The person whose name you’ve been looking for?”

Leo ignored him because his mind was still reeling. “He could be alive,” he said again, more to himself than anything. “He’s not on the list. It’s only been fifty years. People live longer than that. He could be alive, he could be…”

Anywhere.

That realization took the air out of Leo. ‘Anywhere’ was a whole world of round-edged cars and strangers’ phones. And fifty years were long enough to move to the other side of the country, the other side of the ocean, time enough to live an entire second life and be buried at the end of it in some county Leo had never heard of.

But.

He could also be here.

In that little town fifteen minutes from here. Lots of people stayed in town, didn’t they? Going into the same ground as their parents. Leo had just spent hours reading lists that confirmed just that.

“He could be in town,” Leo said. “He could be nearby! Fifteen minutes away. Did you say it was fifteen minutes?” Leo turned from the window to the door, and stopped.

He couldn’t go.

The property line was the end of his world.

Fifteen minutes or fifteen hours, it made no difference.

He made a choked noise. “He could be fifteen minutes away, and I can’t—“ He stopped and whirled around to Nate. “You could go.”

“I could,” Nate said slowly.

“You could! You could ask around. Ask about…” Leo stopped again as the next horrible realization hit.

What would he have Nate ask?

For a man with no name? For a boy from fifty years ago with blue eyes? Half the county probably had blue eyes. And everyone had smoked. It was practically the law.

“I don’t have anything,” Leo confessed. The sum total of what he possessed of the most important person in his entire existence was a color, a smell, and a feeling too big to hold inside of him.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing!” Leo confirmed, raising his voice without meaning to. “I’d have you walk into that town with nothing at all. Excuse me, is anyone here an old man who was young in the seventies?” He gave a humorless laugh, looking at his empty hands. “I know him. I know him. I’d know his name in a list of ten thousand. I’d know his voice through a wall. And I can’t give you one single thing to take with you into that town.”

Nate didn’t rush to fill the silence. He weighed the situation instead. From the look on his face, he was finding it very heavy.

“What do you remember about him?” he asked eventually. “Just tell me, no matter how small it seems.”

“Nothing important.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Leo considered the medium who had his full attention focused on Leo. Nate couldn’t help him. Leo was fairly sure of that, but he was also fairly sure that Nate wanted to help, and that counted for something.

“Blue eyes,” he heard himself say. “Really blue. The smell of cigarettes. He whispered something to me, I don’t know what, just that he whispered, in the dark. Everything was in the dark. And I…” He stopped. The last thing on his list was the most important, and the hardest to say. And yet he wanted to say it. The way he’d likely never said it out loud to someone who wasn’t a close friend. He looked straight at Nate. “I loved him. More than anything in my life. That part isn’t hazy. Everything else is, but that part isn’t.”

“You don’t have to convince me,” Nate said. “I believe you.”

For a moment, Leo just looked at him.

Three words, said in a bright kitchen, with the coffee smell in the air, and nobody came. Nothing happened. Nate drank his coffee and believed him.

“Well,” Leo said. “Good.”