her, filling up her body like concrete, like lead.
She set a hand across her eyes, unbearably relieved to be back, and to have Will here, and with the full force of the chin quiver she’d tried so hard to hide last time she’d seen him, she started to cry.
“Nora,” he said, getting close, and then he was surrounding her, his arms encircling her, pulling her close and tight against him.
“He’s okay,” he said, ducking his head to put his mouth closer to her ear.
“He’s okay,” he repeated.
She nodded and kept right on crying, because she was glad Jonah was okay and also upset that he wasn’t, not in the way she wanted him to be. She cried because she hated this hospital and because she missed Nonna. And she cried because this hug, by this particular person, felt about as good as anything she could imagine, and she hadn’t even let herself realize how much—over the course of these past few days—she’d missed being held by him.
“I’ve got food down there for you,” he said softly, and she thought he might’ve said other stuff before that, too, doctor-type stuff, only she hadn’t been paying attention to anything other than his warmth and his strength and his familiar scent for long minutes. “Marian and Emily are here now, and Benny just took Mr. and Mrs. Salas home for the night.”
She nodded against his chest, felt his hand slip down the length of her hair, felt him let out an uneven breath as his arms tightened briefly around her. When he loosened them again, she leaned back so she could look at him even through her tears, and almost as soon as she did he moved, too, lifting his hands from her body so he could gently wipe his thumbs across her cheeks.
“Okay now,” he said softly, and she closed her eyes at the tenderness of it, a few more tears slipping out as she did.
When she opened them again, she could see him better, her eyes drier and her mind calmer, and she smiled softly as she saw his ridiculously messy hair, his slightly crooked glasses. She reached up and straightened them. She wanted to say, I love you, but she also didn’t, not when she felt like a throbbing, raw, exposed nerve, not when she felt like she’d be holding him hostage to her current state of emotional distress.
So instead she said, “I’m glad to see you.”
“Nora, you’ve got no idea.” He breathed in, his lashes lowering, his head tipping down and briefly shaking side to side. “You’ve got no idea how I missed you.”
“I’ve got some idea.”
“Let me say how sorry I am, about before you left. About that text message. I’ve been thinking, and—”
“Will,” she interrupted, pushing his hair back from his brow. “Let’s not talk about it here, okay? Not in a hospital.”
Will blinked, his brow furrowing, like he couldn’t imagine why a hospital wasn’t a perfectly fine place to have any sort of conversation at all, but then he nodded and said, “Right, yeah. That makes sense. You must want to see Marian and Emily, and I can go check—”
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she blurted desperately, because she was, and also because she hated the way he’d looked when he’d said that—cautious and maybe even a little scared. She moved to grab his hand, to link their fingers together, to reassure him in the same way she wanted to feel reassured—not just about Jonah, but about her relationship with Will. Her future with Will.
For hours she hadn’t thought about it at all, not really; from the minute he’d called her she could only think about getting back, about Jonah and whether he would be well. She’d clung to each of Will’s updates like a lifeline, but she hadn’t thought much beyond that, hadn’t thought about how they’d left things before she’d gone—Will telling her it was too much, Will telling her he didn’t want anything serious.
But now that she was standing here with him like this, she clung to other things: the way he’d called off work, hustling to get information from and about the doctors who were treating Jonah, the way he’d stayed with her neighbors and kept calm and responsible and practical for them all. She clung to the concern etched into every line of his face, to the wrinkles in his shirt and the hospital badge clipped at the waistband of his jeans. She clung to the way he’d done all this