toward the door across from Nora’s. “I ran into Jonah the other day. After I had the dumpster here. He seemed pretty pissed.”
“It wasn’t really a dumpster,” she blurted. God! What was she, his attorney? It was as good as a dumpster. Sort of. Either way, she was already doing exactly what she’d been chastising herself for only a few minutes ago—forgetting herself.
She turned back toward the stairs, eager to get out of this hallway. At the very least, she couldn’t get moony-eyed around a man who was meant to be her enemy while she was inside of hell’s toilet bowl.
“Come on,” she said as she descended, but the truth was, she was talking to herself as much as to him.
“I don’t smell anything,” she said, standing inside the shockingly bright, shockingly clean space formerly known as Donny’s apartment. It hadn’t been that long since she’d last been in here, piles of Donny’s things everywhere, the apartment messy and stale-smelling in a way that’d been hard for her to confront. For all the boasting she’d been doing to Will Sterling about the community-mindedness of the building, the inside of Donny’s apartment had not, on first sight, suggested the surroundings of a community-supported man.
But now, the place looked sunny and felt fresh—the sliding door, open to the balcony, casting bright light over the newly painted walls, the floor mostly clear of debris except for a few boxes stacked tidily against one of the walls. Even with its old cabinets and countertops, she could see that the kitchen practically gleamed. Sure, it was still too bare to seem welcoming, but already it was a massive improvement.
Will had obviously put in a ton of work.
And he was obviously really, really close to finishing.
“I smell paint and bleach,” she added, because she had a feeling her stunned silence was noticeable.
Beside her, Will tipped his head to the right. “We gotta go down the hall.”
She nodded and took a nervous breath, indicating to him that she’d follow his lead. She could’ve made her own way, certainly—every apartment in the building was the same, with bedrooms toward the front of the building and the living areas toward the rear, all of the rooms stacked up single file in the long, narrow arrangement of countless other Chicago apartments. But letting Will go ahead of her at least allowed her the opportunity to openly gawk at the changes without his notice. Even the hallway seemed brighter, and when she tipped her head back to see that two modern-looking light fixtures had been installed, she felt . . . well! She felt almost envious.
But then, she smelled it.
“Oh,” she said, stopping past the first bedroom, right before the apartment’s bathroom door. It wasn’t quite so bad as Will had made it sound, but it sure wasn’t great, either. “I got it now.”
“Yeah. So far as I can tell, nothing in the bathroom, though. No leaks, nothing in the cabinets.”
She edged forward and peeked in, found it as gleaming as the kitchen—nothing on the countertop other than a full bottle of hand soap, a crisp white curtain hanging bright and smooth across the shower. There were fluffy white hand towels to match, hung from a shiny chrome rod on the wall. Hey, she didn’t have one of those! She had to use this annoying freestanding thing that took up extra space on her countertop and made it hard for her to blow-dry her hair without the cord getting caught. Twice she’d almost broken a toe because of it falling down. Also, had he put a new faucet in? That one looked nice, more functional than her—
“I think it’s coming from in here,” he said.
He gestured toward the apartment’s biggest bedroom, the one at the very front of the building with the large picture window. It was the copy of the room she’d been in inside her own apartment—the room that had once been Nonna’s. Seeing Will’s version of it—nothing much more than a (gulp) crisply made bed and a couple of nightstands—was a reminder of how big it really was when it wasn’t crowded with the furniture of Nonna’s that Nora had stubbornly kept even as she’d tried to fit in the things she needed to make her own life here work.
Thankfully, there was no time to dwell on that, not with the reason for her visit becoming immediately more pungent. It still wasn’t quite as bad as she’d been imagining—it reminded her a little of the way the basement