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Leo looked up at the tarnished metal of the chandelier, noting its missing crystals. “It was lit,” he said. “And the table was set, and⁠—”

And.

Leo remembered light reflecting off glass, the murmur of voices. Warmth. He was almost there.

He couldn’t grasp.

“And?” Nate asked.

“That’s all.”

“Who was at the table?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were you?”

Was he? He tried to find himself in the memory. A place at the table, a chair, hands that were his. There was nothing. He was seeing the room from somewhere, so he must have been somewhere — but there was no him in it. Just the light and the noise, and him outside it, looking in.

But that didn’t have to mean anything.

Maybe that was just how memories worked, when someone had torn most of them out.

“I don’t know,” Leo admitted.

Nate didn’t ask again.

In one of the upper bedrooms, they found a water stain on the ceiling, spread out like a map of nowhere.

“Any memories of this room?” Nate asked.

“Rain.”

“That’s helpful.”

“Rain inside.” Leo pointed at the corner below the stain, and the moment he pointed, he could hear the sound the rain made as it dropped into the bucket. “The roof leaked then too, and there was a bucket, and the drops made a sound all night.” Tink. Tink. Tink. “Somebody laughed about it.”

“About a leaking roof?”

“They said…” Leo reached. Something that sounded like a joke, the pitch of a voice, warm, close, someone lying in the dark of this room and laughing at the ceiling. Someone lying… where? Near him? Next to him?

“I don’t remember what they said,” Leo said. “But it was funny.”

“Who?”

Leo couldn’t say. The laugh he heard had no face to go with it.

“The bucket was green,” he said instead.

Nate looked at him for a moment. Then he wrote bucket, green in the notebook, completely serious, as if it mattered at all.

“Let’s just go on.” Leo floated out of the room.

By the third bedroom, Leo was getting tired of this exercise.

Giving a room tour to a medium was stupid. He shouldn’t be giving tours to anyone. No one should be in this house but him. It was his house.

Nate glanced at him. “Why are you looking so grumpy?’