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“But what?”

“I wanted to tell him about you.” When Walt had asked about the flowers, Leo had started telling him about Nate weeding them. It hadn’t mattered that Walt couldn’t hear. Leo had gone on anyway, explaining how much work Nate had done, how different the house looked now.

“You wanted to talk to him about me?”

“Yes. About all the work you’ve done. And how you kept talking to me when you were recording things and then had to cut it out afterward.” Leo smiled a little. “And how you’ve stopped cutting me out. How that made me happy. I wanted him to know I was happy. That I’d met someone.”

“Oh,” Nate said quietly.

“I wish we’d had more time together,” Leo said. “I think I’m always going to wish that. But I don’t wish I was with him instead of you now.”

Nate’s fingers stopped moving against the mug.

“All right.”

“I mean it.”

“I believe you.” Nate let out a breath. “I just needed to ask.”

Leo moved his hand closer to Nate’s. The tea was taking an unreasonable amount of time, considering how badly he wanted it to work. “It’s okay to ask,” he said. “There’s a lot of things I wonder about. A lot of things I wanted to ask Walt. Like if he thinks we made a mistake. I know he blames himself for my death, or he used to, anyway. I hate that. It’s not his fault. It’s probably mine. I talked him into leaving with me. I know that.”

“Stop that.” Nate’s voice was rough.

“Stop what?”

“It’s not your fault that you died, and it’s not Walt’s either. It’s the fault of those goddamn assholes who couldn’t stand that you two loved each other.”

Leo let those words hang in the air between them. Did he believe them? He wanted to, but it didn’t feel right to shrug off all responsibility for his actions. “I knew the world I lived in. I knew the danger. I chose to take the risk anyway, and we both paid for it.”

“You knew it was dangerous,” Nate said. “That doesn’t mean you deserved what happened.”

“I didn’t say I deserved it.”

“No. You said it was your fault.”

Leo looked down. There was a difference, surely, although he couldn’t really explain it. He hadn’t wanted to die. He hadn’t wanted Walt to spend years blaming himself. But he’d wanted them to leave, and they had, and everything else had followed.

“If we’d gone somewhere else⁠—”

“Maybe.” Nate’s voice softened. “Maybe you’d have been safe somewhere else. I wish you had been.”

Leo glanced at him.

“I’m not going to tell you there was nothing you could have done differently. I wasn’t there. I don’t know.” Nate paused. “But you weren’t wrong to want to be with the person you loved.”

Leo didn’t know what to say to that.

Nate’s hand moved toward his.

Leo watched, expecting it to pass through again. Instead, Nate’s fingers caught his, and Leo held on before he’d quite registered that he could.

It felt good, so good, to have a hand to hold on to. “We were supposed to grow old together.”

Nate’s thumb moved over his hand.

Leo looked down at their intertwined fingers. “He got old without me.”

“I know.”