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He put the phone in his pocket.

Leo was still looking at him, standing by the hostas, arms crossed. “You’re seeing someone?”

Nate turned back to the posts. “Yes, I am.”

“Oh.” Leo seemed to weigh this as if he didn’t know what to make of that response.

Nate shook his head as he went back to work. “Silly ghost.”

Leo did not say anything as he floated back into the house.

Leo patrolled.

Foyer, dining room, kitchen. The hallway with its half-stripped walls. Up through the ceiling, along the bedrooms, the turret, down again. He knew the route the way he knew nothing else in the world.

He patrolled, and he thought about lumber.

Nate had gone into town twice this week. Lumber, screws, slug bait. Perfectly ordinary errands.

Leo hadn’t thought anything of it.

Except that a man could meet someone on an errand.

Maybe it was someone from the diner. Maybe it was someone from the comments, one of the people who couldn’t stop noticing Nate’s forearms.

Maybe it had been going on for weeks.

Maybe it had been going on before the tea.

Leo stopped in the upstairs hallway.

Don’t think about that.

He couldn’t stop himself.

It was all he could think about.

The tea night. The most precious memory Leo had.

If there had already been someone and Nate had only done what any decent man with Nate’s abilities would do when they found a ghost falling apart…

An emergency. That was all it had been.

Nate had poisoned himself for Leo’s sake once and he wouldn’t do it again. Leo couldn’t expect him to do it again.

The knowledge sat heavy within Leo. It was what kept him from visiting the sitting room on his nightly patrols these days.

What good was there in watching a sleeping person you wanted and couldn’t have? Leo refused to be that pathetic.

The memory of the night he’d spent in Nate’s arms burned bright and clear in his memory, every moment preserved. More real and substantial than anything he remembered of his actual life. He wouldn’t ruin it for himself by hovering over Nate’s sleeping form like a dog whining because he wasn’t allowed to hop in the bed.

Staying away had kept him content.

He wasn’t content now.

He drifted into the sitting room.

Nate asleep against the wall, one arm around the seal, breathing slow.