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“Such as?”

Leo opened his mouth. He should talk about something. But what? What was even tangible enough to grasp?

Nate waited, pen motionless.

“I remember that the kitchen did not always look like that,” Leo said at last.

Nate glanced toward the doorway. “The cabinets?”

“The whole room. It was different.”

“When?”

Leo glared at him.

Nate jotted something down on the paper. “Right. Okay. Let’s ask something else. What was different?”

“The ceiling was higher. There was a long table near the windows. Not this one. A proper worktable.” Leo looked toward the kitchen, and for a moment he could almost see it: dark wood worn pale along one edge, morning light falling across it. “The walls were yellow.”

“What shade?”

Leo tilted his head at Nate. “Does that matter?”

“It might.”

It almost certainly did not. But Nate was listening as if it did, pen ready, all his attention fixed on Leo rather than the laptop.

Leo turned toward the kitchen again.

“Not bright yellow,” he said. “Something softer.”

Nate wrote it down. Then he sat there tapping the pen against the notebook and thought. After a moment, he got up. “Let’s do a tour.”

“A tour?”

“Of the house. You walk me through it and tell me what comes back.”

Leo hesitated.

Did he want this?

He wanted to remember, yes, but did he want to give Nate a house tour?

That didn’t feel right.

But Nate was already trailing ahead, and Leo could not let him go unsupervised.

The dining room used to hold a very long table.

Leo stood where it used to be and tried to lay the memory over the room. It didn’t fit. The room held sawhorses now, and a shop light on a tripod.

“There was a table here that could sit twelve.”

Nate looked at the walls, and Leo could see him doing math. “This room doesn’t sit twelve.”

“It did.”

Nate wrote that down. “Anything else?”