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“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

Chapter

Forty-Nine

“I’ll give you two some time,” Nate said.

Walt thanked him. Leo looked up, and Nate had to resist the urge to bend down and kiss him before he went. That would have been a perfectly normal thing to do. He wanted something normal very badly.

It wasn’t possible right now.

“I’ll be out back.”

He waited for Leo to nod, then walked away.

The pickup on the drive caught his eye. He’d seen it before, parked by the crooked oak. So that had been Walt. How many times had he driven out here before finally coming to the door?

Nate was glad that he finally had. He could tell Leo about his life. There must have been good things in it too. There must be things Walt wanted to tell Leo without having another person present.

They could use some time to themselves.

And so could Nate.

He opened and closed his fists, needing something to do with his hands.

His eyes fell on a pile of wood by the back steps.

That seemed like the perfect job right about now.

He fetched his ax, found his gloves, and started chopping.

The first log split cleanly. It was satisfying, but not enough to take Nate’s mind off what he’d just heard. Not yet.

He kept at it.

The next log stubbornly took three attempts. Cursing, Nate put more force into the last swing than he needed, sending the two halves flying in opposite directions. He left them where they landed.

“Damn it. Damn it all to hell.”

You were on the floor and they were still kicking you.

The words would not leave his head, even as he set another log on the block.

He’d known Leo was dead from the moment they’d met. Leo had made it pretty hard to miss. Nate had even been annoyed with him for it, for being so inconveniently dead in a house Nate wanted to buy.

He’d never spent much time thinking about how he’d gotten that way.

He’d suspected it would be something terrible. There had been enough clues, but he’d let himself be distracted by everything else there was to know about Leo. Now he couldn’t reconcile the man who complained about his paint choices with the young man Walt had described.

He could imagine Leo telling those men to leave. He could imagine the swearing. After that, he didn’t want to imagine anything.

But his mind wouldn’t stop.

Nate swung again.

He should be used to this shit by now. Very few of the dead who hung around had good stories to tell, and he’d been forced to listen to them since he was a child. He’d learned how to ask the right questions, how to get through conversations like that without falling apart.

At least, he thought he’d learned that.