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“I can see that.” Nate wiped at his face.

“It would have worked if you hadn’t said anything.”

“I’m sure.”

“It would have!” Leo insisted. “Well, you’re properly awake now. You can get your own.”

Nate laughed.

Leo huffed indignantly, and then he laughed too.

By evening of the same day Nate was upright and eating, and by the evening of the next day, he was reaching for the tin again.

It was almost casual, the way he did it — one hand going to the cupboard while the other held his coffee, as if he were going for sugar. As if he hadn’t eaten two painkillers with dinner.

“Stop that,” Leo said.

Nate paused. “You don’t want me to?”

“I don’t think you’ve fully recovered from your last dose.”

“I wasn’t going to take much.”

“And it probably wouldn’t take much to make your head hurt again.” Leo drifted between him and the cupboard, arms crossed. “Besides. There’s only so much in that tin, and I doubt you can ask your mother for more. We need to be smart about this.”

Nate looked at him for a moment. Something moved through his face — amusement, and under the amusement something warmer that Leo chose not to examine. “Fine,” Nate said. “You can be the tea treasurer.”

“I’ll take my role very seriously,” Leo agreed.

He inspected the tin that night while Nate slept. He weighed the contents with his eyes. How many days could they get out of it?

Quite a few, if Nate only took a little at a time.

They’d have to be sensible about any activities that required more than that.

They were sensible. Mostly.

A rhythm found them. Nate worked, Leo supervised, and twice a week Leo haunted the camera. A curtain. A paint can. Once, the cellar door, which made the comments lose their minds. In the evenings they went through the footage together, and then the comments.

Nate read the best ones out loud. Leo dictated responses that Nate usually refused to send.

And on the good evenings, Nate made his coffee with a pinch of tea in it, and they sat against the wall with the laptop, and Nate held his hand.

That was all. A pinch was just enough that Nate’s fingers could lace through his and stay there while they argued about strangers.

Leo would have traded almost anything for it, every night. He didn’t say so. As a treasurer, he had to keep some things to himself.

Some evenings they watched that show on Nate’s laptop instead. Nate got everything wrong about the seventies, as did the show, and Leo corrected both of them, but only mildly, because he liked the way Nate laughed, and he liked the way Nate’s thumb moved back and forth over Leo’s knuckles the whole time.

On those evenings, Leo could fool himself completely. This was a life. A man, a house, a show neither of them respected, a hand around his. What could possibly be missing?

Two weeks passed like that. Flowers bloomed in the yard. The fox came by sometimes.

Things were good.

Then Nate came home with a flyer.

He’d gone to town for wood filler, and he came back with sawdust in his hair, holding the flyer like a winning ticket. “Says here there’s a salvage auction. Some estate sale, two counties over. They’re breaking up an 1890s house. That’s the same era as this one.” He put the flyer on the table. “It’s a whole weekend. I’d leave Friday.”