I made a sandwich and poured myself a glass of iced tea, dumping so much sugar in it, you could see a layer of white on the bottom quarter of the glass. I rummaged in the pantry until I found an old, likely stale bag of chips, and took it all up to my room.

I sat at my desk, the food spread out next to my open laptop, and wolfed down half my sandwich while checking the IMDb page for Celeste’s movie. Of course, the director was still listed as TBA—it couldn’t be that easy. So instead I pulled up my email. I’d been neglecting it since the night at Tesori Antico, only popping in every week or so to weed out my in-box. Most of the time, it was crammed with junk, but every so often there was a legit email that I wanted to ignore. This time there was an email from my grandma—pictures from my graduation. I looked sweaty and irritated. My shoulders were bunched up and tense, as if I was waiting for something bad to happen. And Peyton’s chair shrine was in the background, turning the edges of every photo crimson. I closed the email and dragged it into the trash. Dad would be pissed that I didn’t share the pictures with him, but he was a photographer, so I knew he had more than enough of his own. So many he wouldn’t know what to do with them. Probably stuff them away somewhere and never look at them again.

I scrolled down, picking off emails and sending them to the trash, one by one. A sale ad for a boutique. A postgrad questionnaire from the school. A reminder from our former class president to join some stupid classmate website so they could find us come reunion time. Uh, no thanks. Junk, junk, and more junk.

I drained my tea, pushed my empty plate over by the chips, and brushed off my hands. I didn’t have time for pictures and questionnaires and websites. I had searching to do.

It took no time for me to learn that Chris had been right. Heriberto Abana didn’t have much of an online footprint. In fact, if the internet was any indication, there didn’t seem to be any existing person with that name at all. It was like he was a ghost. Maybe I had the name wrong. Maybe Albany came to me in eggplant for an entirely different reason. Maybe that was just the color of the word Albany and there was no connection behind it at all and I was totally giving my synesthesia too much credit. But no, I felt strongly that wasn’t it. Because even if Albany was eggplant all on its own, so was Abana. I could see that clearly.