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“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“Naturally.” Nate considered for a moment. Where to even start? “You know the gift runs in my family. But you have to understand, in my family the gift isn’t something you have. It’s something you are. There was never a question about what I’d do with my life.”

“Because you were so talented.”

“The strongest medium in three generations.”

“And so humble about it.”

“I’m only quoting my grandmother.”

Leo waved at him to continue.

Nate did. “I did my first clearings before I even finished elementary school. I kept getting taken along to jobs. While other kids had soccer practice, I helped my mom talk dead people out of the buildings they occupied.”

“I feel worse for the dead people you evicted than I do for you.”

“I figured you would.” Nate turned his mug on the table. “I didn’t really do it because I wanted to but because it was expected of me. It’s odd sort of work. You do it perfectly, and most people will never notice. The house looks the same. The room looks the same. There’s just less in it. Nobody can see what you did. And you can’t tell anyone outside the family either, unless you want to be the freak kid.”

“The freak kid,” Leo repeated.

Nate shrugged. “Kids notice when you flinch at empty corners and talk to people who aren’t there.”

Leo didn’t have a quip for that one.

“So that was my life. I made the lingering traces of the departed disappear.” Nate paused. “And then, the summer I was sixteen, our neighbor decided he wanted a porch and paid me to help him for three weekends. At the end of it, there was a porch.”

“That’s generally how it works, yes.”

“You’re not hearing me. There was a porch. Something that hadn’t been there, and then it was. Nobody needed a gift to see what I’d done. I’d made something exist instead of making it be gone. I could stand next to it.” From the look on Leo’s face, Nate wasn’t sure he was grasping the enormity of the moment, but to teenage Nate, that experience had been everything. He’d wanted more of it. “So I started looking for jobs like that. Weekends, summers. Whenever my family wasn’t dragging me to haunted places. I started to hate those. So when I was nineteen I stood up during family dinner and told them all that I was going to quit the family business. That I was going to build things instead.”

Leo leaned forward. “And? What did they say?”

Nate turned the laptop toward him.

“You’ll hear the other half of the story later.”

Leo stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am.”

“You can’t leave me hanging there!”

“I can.”

“You’re a horrible man.”

“The list, Leo.”

Leo glared at him. Then he left his chair to float around the table and look at the screen showing the county’s ugly gray website with its columns of names. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll read the list of your dead people.” He squinted. “The text is tiny.”

Nate zoomed in.

“Better.”

Leo read, eyes moving down the first column.

“Next,” he said.