the way to the airport before she let herself text back. Some of it had been that same fear, but some of it had been her belief that Will really did need the time. That what he needed to work out—about his parents, about being serious—he needed to work out without her.
Now, though—a day away from heading back—she worried she’d made a mistake, insisting on the wait. Banishing him to silence when he’d at least tried to reach out, and all because she hadn’t wanted to take the risk: to tell him she loved him, and to have him not say it back.
To have him not feel it back.
“I will,” she said finally, trying to convince herself, trying to ignore the vise grip she felt around her heart when she thought about it. “I’m going to tell him how I feel, and if he doesn’t feel it, too, I’ll move on.”
She paused, lifting her head to look across the way at her friend. “Not that I have a great track record of moving on from things in an expedient manner.”
Dee smiled sympathetically, patting Nora’s shin. “Now, now,” she said. “Give yourself some credit. You forget the pictures you showed me of that bathroom you redid.”
“True,” Nora thought, trying not to focus on the fact that she’d done nearly all of that moving on with Will right at her side. “And I have plans now.”
All week, she’d been thinking about them: changes she would make once she got back home. Away from the apartment, not so immediately surrounded by Nonna’s things, it had been easier to consider. When she pictured it now—that jammed-up bedroom she used as an office, that floral couch she really couldn’t stand—she could see how silly she had been to keep so much of it exactly the same. And as she stayed here with Deepa, helping her friend with the preliminary packing for her move next month, it’d been easy to see how well Dee’s things—her bold, comfortable furniture, her gilt-framed decorative mirrors hung in clever arrangements on the walls, her many, many candles—reflected Dee herself.
Nora wanted a chance to have that again in the place she called home.
So. More changes to the apartment. Looking for a new job. That was the plan.
With or without Will.
“Why don’t we FaceTime him now?” said Dee, always impatient. “I’ll stay out of frame, and I’ll leave if it gets weird, I promise. Here, I’ll get you more wine so you can really lean in to it,” she said, moving to swing her legs over Nora’s.
“No, no,” Nora said, draining the small amount of wine that was left in her glass. “I don’t want to have too much before I fly tomorrow. It always makes me woozy.”
“Waaaaaaah,” Dee said dramatically, grabbing at Nora’s shins in playful desperation. “You’re leaving me tomorrow and you won’t give me anything entertaining to watch tonight!”
Nora laughed and bent her knees, gently toppling Dee to the side. “I ought to sleep,” she said. “You know me and my early starts.”
“I swear to God, Nora,” Dee said, standing. “If you make noise before six a.m. again, that’s it for you ever being my houseguest in the future. Even when I get a gigantic condo in Berkeley with my new huge salary.”
“I said I was sorry about the garbage disposal! I thought it was the light switch!”
For the next few minutes, they laughed and argued as they made up the couch into Nora’s bed for the night, Dee eventually giving Nora the same lecture she’d given her for the last several nights, which was all about how Nora didn’t take off her makeup at night properly. When Nora finally—after getting yelled at about washcloths a few more times through the bathroom door—settled onto the couch, calling a joking “Good night, Sleeping Beauty!” to Dee, she felt the fatigue from the wine and from the workday settle over her like a blanket. But even as her mind and body sunk closer to sleep, she still thought of Will, the same way she had every night she’d been away—whether he was okay, whether he missed her, whether he’d ever held his phone in his hand, like she had, and thought of calling. She did it now, too, out of habit—swiped her thumb across her screen, navigated to the text box where Will’s Good luck sat like a bad omen.
Maybe she should text something—a few words about how it had gone over the past few days? A question about how his