“Who’s Norris?” Leo asked.

“A friend of ours,” I told him. “Sort of.”

Leo accepted it, but clearly had no memory of him.

“Of course I could have heard about it somewhere. That would be the sensible explanation.”

“Yeah,” I had to admit, “it would be.”

“But here’s the thing. You know that scientist guy—Stephen Hawking? Well, right before he died, he published a paper saying that parallel universes probably exist. They say he would’ve gotten a Nobel Prize for it, but you gotta be alive to get one of those.”

“So you’re saying you believe me now?”

He took a deep breath. “Let’s not go there,” he said. “Let’s just go with what is. What we know for sure. And what I know for sure is this.” Then he took out a football from his backpack. “I was thinking maybe we could toss it around.”

“Here? In a graveyard?”

“The dead don’t mind. And neither do the caretakers. My dad and I come here and toss a ball around sometimes. They know us. They know about Angela. And I’m sure the caretakers won’t mind you handling a football here, considering who your father is.”

My father. It was an odd thing being in his shadow now, when I had never known him to cast much of a shadow at all.

“I was thinking,” said Leo, “that maybe I’d get my GED and go to community college. Maybe get back into football. Some community colleges here have good teams, don’t they?”

“Yeah, Leo,” I said, trying to keep my eyes from clouding up. “Yeah, they do.” I backed up to put a fair throwing distance between us, then we started tossing the ball back and forth over the dead like it was a perfectly natural thing to do. We kept it up until sundown, when the caretakers politely shooed us out and locked the gate for the night. But before I left, I put a hand on Angela’s headstone, said a silent prayer, and made her a promise that I would not leave her like this.

“If you need my help with this thing that you say is going on,” Leo said, “you got my number.”

Then we went our separate ways.

I got home just in time for an honest-to-goodness sit-down dinner—something that was rare for our family in this world, although in my original dump of a house, we did it almost every night. Here, no one lived on the same schedule, so most of the time it was takeout, and leftovers from yesterday’s takeout.

But tonight, Cara, our housekeeper, had prepared a real meal: a roast with fingerling potatoes, which always sounded vaguely cannibalistic to me. Cara was Black. She tried to serve us, but I insisted on serving myself—and, following my lead, so did Hunter.