said, and she looked over at him, though he didn’t return the gesture. He was really focused on this table, and also an incredibly specific thing about her life timeline that extremely didn’t matter.
“That’s not untrue. I moved back here last year. As a kid I used to . . . I lived here every summer, with my grandmother. And I came for a lot of holidays. That’s what Jonah meant, about twenty years.”
The arms he had crossed over his chest shifted, tightened. But he didn’t say a word.
She chafed under what felt like an admonishing silence. What did he expect, that she’d give him her whole life story in a few minutes of golden-hour conversation? Anyway it’s not like he’d given her a full accounting of his terrible rental-property scheme. She should be admonishing him! She would start with his behavior in the basement. No matter that she’d wanted him gone; it’d been rude, the way he’d walked out. She would say that. She would tell him about his manners! Nonna definitely would have done that.
But when she turned to him and opened her mouth, the admonishment that came out was, “I thought you wore glasses.”
And then she promptly looked back down at the table, which she very much would have liked to crawl under. It could conveniently serve as the headstone for her oncoming death from embarrassment.
Beside her, Will cleared his throat. When he spoke there was possibly another smirk behind it, but she wouldn’t know, what with all the attention she was paying to her new backyard tomb.
“I do, sometimes. I also have contacts.”
“Right, of course. That must be very convenient.”
There was a long silence. Surely he was using it to suppress his laughter.
“Ms. Clarke,” he said finally, and the best thing she could say about that as a reopener was that it at least made her angry enough to feel like speaking again; it at least reminded her of his letter, and what they were here for in the first place.
They turned to face each other again, Will dropping his arms and returning his hands to his pockets. Whatever frowning, frustrated countenance he’d left the basement with, he’d smoothed it. Obviously he’d been helped along by her ridiculous comment about his glasses, and she kicked herself for giving him the upper hand.
“You don’t need to call me Ms. Clarke,” she said, though the stiffness in her voice suggested she was exactly the kind of person who would prefer to be called Ms. Clarke. “You can call me Nora.”
“Nora, then,” he said after a beat, and as it turned out, she didn’t like that much better, primarily because she immediately liked it way too much—the way he said it, the way he looked at her when he said it.
Like he knew her.
Beneath her shirt, she felt warm with . . . annoyance? Yes, she would definitely settle on annoyance. No other feelings options allowed.
“What you need to know,” she began, because thinking about her neighbors’ instructions absolutely made her feel less . . . annoyed, “is that this building can’t really accommodate what you’ve outlined in your letter.”
“I don’t see why not. I have a unit I don’t intend to live in. I have a permit to rent it on a short-term basis. It’s accommodated.”
Okay, now she was genuinely annoyed, not lying-to-herself annoyed. “It’s not about your . . . your unit.” Her cheeks heated. Why did unit sound so off-color when she said it? A mystery! She rushed on. “It’s about the people who live here. We can’t accommodate it.”
“It’s not for you to accommodate. As I said in the letter, I’ll maintain the unit, and I’ll do my best to make sure—”
“You won’t be able to do that. You live all the way across town, and you work all the time. You said it yourself.”
Something ticked in his jaw. “I’m not here to make trouble for anyone.”
“You are, though. You have to understand”—Good, she thought, remember your lines—“you have to understand that this building is really unique. Everyone who lives here has lived here for a long time, and we—”
“Right. Twenty years for you, was it?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Whatever, yes! Twenty years, though I don’t see why it matters so much to you. In any case, I know everything you don’t about this place, and I’m telling you, you’ll be causing a lot of difficulty for the people who live here.”
“But you don’t.”
She blinked. “I don’t what?”
“You don’t know everything. For example, you clearly