I felt Tuck’s warm arm, his hair near my face. I had fallen asleep on the bed beside him, fully dressed. I tried to roll over and couldn’t. In his sleep he’d thrown his arm over me. The smell of toast and coffee and the hot room and his arm, it all coalesced into an unformed understanding of something, a hint, a flash of the future. This body smelling of shampoo and old liquor. This falling asleep and dreaming the same dream. This is what people want, what everybody wants. This moment, the toast and heat and Tuck—this was the opposite of loneliness.

I fell asleep again, and when I woke up, Tuck was sitting on the opposite bed, wide-awake, looking at me.

“I just got an idea,” Tuck said. I rolled over, rubbed my eyes. “You know where we have to go? I can’t believe we didn’t think of this. Bus station.”

“You’re right,” I said.

“Right? We’re transit people.”

“We’re information people,” I said.

I dressed in a hurry, and we went out into the sunshine. Neither of us mentioned the night before, and that seemed best. There were no buses in front of the bus station, and inside only a couple of benches, a rack of brochures, a water fountain, and an information desk with an old man sitting behind it.

We produced the picture of Cole, and the man listened and glared, all the while smoothing his mustache.

“I told you, I’ve never seen him,” the man said.

“You haven’t told us anything,” I said. “This is the first time we’ve asked you.”

“Well, I can’t help you,” he said.

“Did someone else ask about this man?” I said.

The man said, “I thought it was you.”

“Can you describe who you saw?” I asked. “Anything about them. I mean, old or young? Male or female?”

“I can’t help.” He wouldn’t say any more.

Outside, the day was bright and cold and still. A long, slow day. We stood in front of the bus station door. “Someone else is looking for him,” I said.

Tuck nodded. “This is how we find him,” he said.

What a relief to think that we were not alone in this search, that we had never been alone. “Who is it, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Tuck said. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Someone from his past life would try to contact him.”

“Don’t say past life.”

“Former life?”

“Real life.”

We went back to the motel with a whole pizza and sat on the bed, watching old episodes of Who’s the Boss? as the morning passed and the afternoon unfolded out the window. Who was the other person looking for Cole? Every few minutes we said this out loud. But we never had an answer.

“I should call home,” I said.

“What are you going to tell them?”