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But that would probably make people even more curious. The best plan of attack might be to pretend he hadn’t seen this.

He closed the tab and then his laptop and then he got his notebook out. He’d distract himself by planning his next few days.

Tomorrow, he wrote. Dining rm: finish demo to corner stud. Check joist ends.

A sound from above. Something small falling over.

What was Leo doing up there?

Normally he was patrolling the grounds at this time.

Blue eyes, his pen wrote before he could direct his thoughts elsewhere. Leo’s eyes were not blue.

They were strikingly green.

His pencil was moving before he knew what he was doing.

He drew an arc first. The curve of an eye, then its twin. The lashes. He tried to capture the way they narrowed when their owner was building up to an objection.

Nate had sketched his whole life; people first, then rooms and buildings. It seemed he was back to people tonight.

He drew Leo’s brows and then the hair that fell over his forehead, his cheekbones, his jaw. A mouth held tight, mid-argument.

The eyes were still wrong, though. He kept coming back to them. Not the shape, that had come easy, he’d looked at them often enough. It was the brightness he couldn’t get. The way they looked too alive, too vivid for a dead man. He tried crosshatch. He tried leaving the highlight white, and that got him closer, but it was still not right. Some things needed color, and all he had was graphite.

He tilted the notebook toward the work lamp. The face looked back up at him from beside the joist notes. Furious. Fine-boned.

Leo.

A rough sketch, but still recognizable.

It was the first time Nate had sketched a ghost since he’d moved out of his mother’s home.

He was still looking at the notebook when the temperature in the room dropped ever so slightly.

“What is that?” Leo said. “Who are you drawing?”

Nate’s first instinct was to close the notebook, but that would only have made him look more suspicious. He was allowed to doodle in his notebook, wasn’t he?

Leo drifted around to see the page properly. He was looking at the drawing with his head tilted. “Who is that?”

Nate turned to him. “You don’t know?”

Leo’s eyes narrowed almost exactly the same way Nate had drawn them. “How would I know?” he snapped. “You’ve never invited this man here. Are you going to? Is this Thomas?”

Was that jealousy in his tone?

Nate almost wanted to laugh. He might have; if the moment had not been so tragic. After all, how would Leo know what he looked like? He’d lost his memories, and ghosts did not show up in mirrors.

“Is it Thomas?” Leo demanded again.

Nate licked his lips and very carefully said, “It’s you.”

For a heartbeat or two, Leo said nothing.

He looked at the drawing, head tilted, eyes scanning the lines, brows furrowing. If there was recognition in his gaze, Nate didn’t see it.

“That’s not me,” Leo said, but his voice lacked conviction. It wasn’t a voice braced for an argument, which left Nate with little idea what to say.