The water in Gray Valley tasted like metal. Billy knew this because he had been drinking it since he was born, and even though the adults were gone and the town had stopped treating it, the water still tasted the same—thin and metallic, with a hint of something that might have been rust or might have been nothing at all.

Billy boiled it now. He always boiled it. The rule was simple: if you could not see an adult, boil the water. It was not a rule anyone had written down. It was a rule that had appeared, like a law of physics, in the days after the sickness. Boil the water. Don't drink it raw. That was all anyone knew.

Sarah came to the library on Tuesdays. This was also a rule, though a softer one. Billy went to the library every Tuesday to find books. Sarah waited for him at the door. They did not talk much about why. They did not need to.

The library was a small building on Main Street, a single story with three rooms and a reading area that had a couch with broken springs. Billy had cleared out the dust and swept the floors and found a working flashlight in the basement. The books were mostly fine—some water damage in the fiction section, but the nonfiction was intact. He had read every book in the nonfiction section in three weeks. Now he was working through fiction.

On this Tuesday, he found a book called The Old Man and the Sea. It was thin, with a blue cover that had faded to gray. He opened it and read the first page. Then he closed it and put it back on the shelf and took down something else. He would come back to it later.

Sarah was not at the door when he arrived. This was unusual. She was always at the door on Tuesdays.

Billy sat on the steps outside the library and waited. He watched the street. Gray Valley had maybe two thousand people before. Now it had two. Maybe three, if you counted Old Man Henderson, but Henderson had been asleep for a week and Billy had stopped checking.

Sarah arrived ten minutes late, carrying a canvas bag. She was fifteen, small for her age, with hair that she cut herself using kitchen scissors and a dress that had belonged to her mother.

"Sorry," she said. "The well was low. Had to go to the creek."

"Did you boil it?"

"Yeah."

Billy nodded. They had established a system. Sarah handled food and water. Billy handled books and repairs. They did not discuss the system. It worked, and discussion was unnecessary.

They walked back to Billy's house together. It was a small ranch-style home on the edge of town, the kind that had been built in the fifties and never updated. Billy's father had worked at the steel mill until it closed three years before the sickness. His mother had died when he was nine. He had been living alone for two years before Sarah arrived, and the first month of her presence felt less like companionship and more like a minor adjustment to an established routine.

The house was cold. The furnace had stopped working in October, and by November it was clear that nobody was going to fix it. They slept in the same bedroom, not out of any particular arrangement but because it was the only room with a window that closed all the way and kept the wind out.

"I found something at the supermarket," Sarah said, setting the canvas bag on the kitchen table. She pulled out a can of beans, a box of pasta, and—unexpectedly—a jar of strawberry jam that had expired in 2017.

She held the jam up and laughed. It was a small laugh, quick and surprised, the kind of laugh that caught Billy off guard because he did not hear it often.

"Expired," he said.

"Yeah. But it's sealed."

"Sealed expired food is still expired food."

"Maybe." She set the jam on the table beside the beans. "I'm going to eat it anyway."

Billy did not argue. She could eat whatever she wanted. He had learned early that arguing about things that did not matter was a waste of energy.

After lunch—beans and pasta, boiled water, the expired jam that Sarah ate with her fingers because there were no spoons clean enough to trust—they went to the community pool.

The pool had been empty for years before the sickness. The sickness had not changed it. It was still empty, still green with algae, still smelling of chemicals that had long since dissipated. But the air was cool and the sky was wide and there was nobody else around, so they went anyway.

They swam in the empty pool, kicking water at each other, laughing when the water hit their faces and was cold and shocking. Billy floated on his back and looked at the sky. It was a Tuesday in February, which meant it was probably cold, but the sun was out and the air felt almost warm, and for a moment he forgot that the adults were gone.

Then he remembered. He always remembered.

They walked home in the late afternoon. The streets of Gray Valley were quiet. Not the quiet of peace—the quiet of absence. No cars. No voices. No lawnmowers or dog barks or the distant hum of a television through an open window. Just wind moving through empty streets and the occasional sound of a door opening and closing.

That evening, Billy sat at the kitchen table with a notebook he had found in the house. It was a spiral-bound notebook, mostly blank, with a few grocery lists and phone numbers written in his mother's handwriting. He opened it to a fresh page and wrote:

Tuesday. Sarah came late. Well was low. Found jam at Kroger. Expired but sealed. Ate it anyway. Swam at the pool. Sky was blue.

He stopped writing. He looked at the words on the page. They were not very good words. They were not very interesting words. But they were true, and truth was the only thing left that mattered.

Sarah came into the kitchen and sat across from him. She was drying her hair with a towel and looking at what he had written.

"What are you writing?"

"Nothing."

"Let me see."

He hesitated, then slid the notebook across the table. Sarah read the entry. She was quiet for a moment.

"You should write more," she said.

"Why?"

"Because someday you'll want to remember. And if you don't write it down, you'll forget."

Billy looked at her. She was serious. Not sentimental—serious. She believed that writing things down mattered, not because the writing mattered but because the remembering mattered.

"Okay," he said.

Sarah smiled. It was a small smile, but it was real, and it made the kitchen feel less cold.

Billy closed the notebook. He looked out the window at the street, at the empty houses, at the sky turning from blue to gray to the color of old dishwater. Tomorrow was Wednesday. On Wednesday, they would boil the water and eat beans and maybe go to the pool again. On Thursday, Billy would go to the library and find a new book. On Friday, Sarah would check the well. On Saturday, they would do nothing in particular. On Sunday, they would do nothing in particular. On Monday, they would do nothing in particular. On Tuesday, Sarah would come to the library.

He thought about this. He thought about the jam and the pool and the way Sarah smiled when she ate expired food with her fingers. He thought about the notebook and the words he had written and the fact that they were true.

Today the sun was good. Sarah smiled. He thought that might be enough.

He closed the notebook and sat in the kitchen and watched the light fade from the sky, and for a moment—just a moment, the width of a breath—he did not think about the adults at all.