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“Yeah.”

“Then go to sleep.”

Nate put his mouth against his hair, a smile forming on his lips.

Idly, he imagined what the room would look like through the camera. A man on a sleeping bag with one arm bent around nothing, smiling for no reason.

He hated the thought.

They should know who he was smiling for.

Chapter

Forty-Three

Late the following afternoon, Leo watched Nate take the painting off the mantel. That was curious. The medium had spent most of the day objecting to any and all movement, so Leo hadn’t expected him to start a project.

“What are you doing?”

“I think we’ve been asking the wrong people.”

About the painting? Leo tilted his head. “Do you want to take the painting into town again?”

“No. That’s what I mean.” Nate set it on a chair, leaning it carefully against the back. “We asked people who lived in town. But the people who were here were hiding.”

Leo hadn’t thought of it that way, but he had to concede that Nate had a point there. It made sense that nobody in the diner had recognized Leo when Leo had spent his time here in hiding.

He looked down at the floor as if he could see through it to the basement. “Who else do you want to ask?”

“The people watching my channel.”

Leo looked up.

“My viewers are scattered all over the country,” Nate explained. “They can share the painting with people we wouldn’t know to ask.”

Leo studied his painted face. Somewhere out there, someone might still recognize it.

Wouldn’t that be something?

“All right,” he said. “You can tell them you found it upstairs. That’s what you told the people in town, isn’t it?”

“It is, but I’m not doing that again.”

“Then what are you telling them?”

“That I painted you.”

Leo frowned. “How are you going to explain that?”

“By telling them I’m a medium.”

Oh.

Leo looked at Nate, who was busy adjusting the painting against the back of the chair as if it needed adjusting—it did not. “You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

“You said you would never tell them that. You said they’d call you a freak.”