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At six in the morning, he’d taken one of them down and now he was sanding it on two sawhorses in the sitting room.

Focusing on the work made it easier to stop thinking about questions he couldn’t answer. Like why Leo had decided to stick around in this house for fifty years.

Something to do with the basement, but what?

Nate really wanted to go down there and check.

But if he did, any trust he’d managed to win from the ghost would be lost. So he continued to work on the door, wiping the dust off it with a rag.

Next, he applied two coats of white primer. It would take all morning to dry, but that was alright. He had plenty of things to do in the meantime.

“What is that?” Leo floated in the doorway.

“Your canvas.”

Leo looked at the cabinet door. He looked at it long enough that Nate checked it himself, to see what was wrong with it.

“That’s a cupboard,” Leo said.

“It’s a cabinet door.”

Leo shot him a look that was clearly meant to say ‘same thing.’

“It’s oak. It’ll outlast both of us.” He heard that after he’d said it. “It’s what we’ve got. I don’t own a canvas.”

Leo came into the room. He studied the door with its old hinge holes as if he needed to decide whether to be insulted. “Your plan is getting stupider by the minute. I hope you know that.”

“Do you have a better one?”

“No,” the ghost admitted grudgingly. “When are we doing this?”

“The primer needs to dry, so maybe this afternoon if the light’s good in the sitting room.”

“This afternoon.” Leo nodded once, and then he left the room through the wall, leaving Nate to stand there with the primer brush dripping on the floorboards.

This ghost…

The light was good.

Leo stood in it like he’d been ordered to, very straight, shoulders back, hands at his sides… and his eyes fixed on a point roughly a foot to the left of Nate’s head.

Nate looked over his shoulder. There was the fireplace there.

“Could you look at me?”

“I’m looking at you.”

“You’re looking at the mantel.”

“You’re in front of the mantel.”

Nate let it go.

He didn’t need the eyes yet anyway. He propped the notebook open against a paint can and started the way he’d been taught, pencil first, lightly, blocking the head in from the sketch he already had. Where the crown went. Where the chin went.

He could work without looking up for a while.

He looked up anyway.