“Should we turn it off and check?”

He startled at the suggestion. “No!” he said.

“Okay,” I assured him. “We don’t have to. I would never make you do anything, Lee. Nothing that you didn’t want to do. But I don’t think he’s here. I really don’t. It’s only you and me.”

He nodded, and my heart ached for him. His little furrowed brow. His callused hands and his crooked finger. I touched his earlobe, small and perfect. “I’ll always protect you,” I said. “For as long as we are here together.”

He nodded. “Okay, Mila.”

I put my arm around him and felt his body lean into mine. He smelled like grass, like earth, like early mornings.

“I’ll never leave you,” I said to him. I closed my eyes. I felt his body relaxing, heard the slowing of his breath. “You’ll have to grow up and leave me first.”

Time passed and my legs started aching. I endured the discomfort as long as I could, but when I tried to shift positions without bothering him, he sat up. “We can go back out now,” he said. “I feel better.”

So I opened the closet door, and he pulled the chain to turn off the light. I stepped out and he followed. Until now, I’d felt that I could take care of him myself, but as I watched him climb the stairs on his own, I knew that I couldn’t. He had always been anxious and easily startled, but to hide in a closet under the stairs? To huddle in a ball and rock himself? To talk so desperately about his ghost? All of that was new.

Terry was in the kitchen tending to his bread.

“Do you have a minute?” I asked him.

“Always,” he said.

So I told him what had happened as he kneaded. I had expected some alarm, but, though he listened closely and appeared concerned, he didn’t seem surprised. “Thank you for telling me, Mila,” he said when I had finished. “That was the right thing to do. He’s upstairs now?”

“Yes.”

He crossed to the sink. “I want you to know . . . ,” he said as the water ran, as he picked the soap off its dish and rubbed it between his palms. “You are a true friend to Lee.” I let his words linger as he dried his hands on a cloth.

He paused before he left the kitchen to place a hand on my shoulder.

“A true friend to all of us,” he said.

___

Later, in Billy’s cabin, Liz strummed a ukulele while Billy read silently from a book of poems. I lay in the center of the bed, staring at the darkness through the skylight, thinking of Lee. Finally I sat up. Billy lowered his book. Liz let the instrument lie in her lap.

“What is it?” she asked.