“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marian nearly shouted. “Nora’s been with us for twenty years!”
Even without looking over at him, Nora could feel that Will had turned to look at her. Her whole right side felt hot with his gaze.
For long seconds, no one said a word, and that’s because everyone was waiting for Will to respond. That’s how it worked when it came to Marian Goodnight: if she asked you a question, you answered it, and quick, too. Everyone knew that.
Everyone but Will Sterling.
“I thought you said you moved in last year,” he said, to Nora’s very hot right side.
“Last year!” shouted Jonah. “She lived here when she was in diapers!”
“She never lived here in diapers,” said Mrs. Salas. “You’re thinking of Benny.”
Jonah scratched his head, looked over at Benny, who had, in fact, lived here for a good portion of his childhood. Which was over forty years ago.
“She came when she was nine, Jonah, remember?” said Mr. Salas. “She had a bowl cut.”
Jonah furrowed his thin, white eyebrows, and then he laughed, slapping his knee. “Right! Called her Ringo that first summer.”
Beside him, Benny snorted. “Good thing you grew that out.”
Right and left side—all sides, really—now hot with embarrassment. It was a Herculean task not to touch her ponytail, just to reassure herself it was still there. At the moment, she felt about as awkward as she had when she was nine, standing outside with her parents on the hot-concrete cracked sidewalk with a brand-new suitcase and a whole lot of anxiety.
“You’ve lived here since you were nine?” Will said, and this time—it wasn’t quite a golden-hour echo, but it was softer, quieter. She looked his way.
Brown eyes. He had brown eyes, a shade or two lighter than his hair and eyebrows. It was so easy to notice them now, what with how focused they were on her.
“Uh. It’s complicated.”
“Complicated,” he repeated. She felt pinned by his gaze, by this softly spoken word, and for a second, she forgot about their audience. About what they were doing there in the first place.
But then Jonah shouted, “What’d they say?”
She looked away from Will, back to her neighbors. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Will move, but she didn’t look over to investigate. He’s leaving, she thought, and tried to be relieved about it. If nothing else, at least she’d stopped his charm offensive before it could get started. He’d be gone for now, and she could get back to figuring out how to fix this.
She waited, eyes ahead, for him to offer at least a cursory goodbye to her neighbors.
But he didn’t.
“Ms. Clarke,” he said instead, exactly like his awful letter. “Can I see you outside?”
He hadn’t waited to see if she would follow.
No, he’d left the basement in an upright stride that was the exact opposite of the lanky, casual charm with which he’d walked in, and when Nora made her way up the musty rear stairwell, her palms still sweaty, she half expected him to be gone already.
It had taken a few minutes to disentangle herself from the cacophonous aftermath of his departure, her neighbors bursting with various assessments of Will Sterling (“Rude!” according to Marian, agreed upon by Jonah and Benny; “Seems a bit moody,” offered Mr. Salas, countered by Mrs. Salas’s more generous “Maybe he was nervous!”; and, finally, “Very tall!” per Emily, who seemed not to mean this as a compliment). After that, there’d been a sweeping instructional impulse: everyone wanted to remind Nora of their own particular grievance with the short-term rental idea. As she took the steps up to the yard, she could hear their various pleas and insistences:
You’ve got to tell him, Nora—
What he needs to know is—
He has to understand that—
When she pushed open the back door and walked into the bright, warm afternoon sunshine, Will was there waiting. Middle of the yard, arms crossed, staring down at the black, wrought-iron tabletop of their collectively held patio furniture.
He hardly seemed to notice her approach, didn’t move when she came to stand even with him. He kept his eyes on the table, his brows furrowed, as though he was expecting to find something there. Weirdly, she felt compelled to stare at it, too. They probably looked like they were solemnly standing over a casket, or a headstone, rather than over the spot where Benny and Jonah had an extremely regrettable potato-skin-eating contest last week.