the first time in her adult life, her full-time home, though the precise nature of the judgments had changed over the years. When she’d first come to visit, her parents had spent the whole drive from the airport speaking quietly—well, not that quietly—to each other about Nonna wasting years of money and effort on this “little building” when she could’ve stayed in her perfectly nice, paid-off house in the suburbs after her husband, Nora’s grandfather, passed. Two decades later and the judgments were different: Wasn’t it the most dated-looking building on the block? Shouldn’t it try to do a little better to keep up? Hadn’t anyone considered making it brighter, more modern? Was that striped wallpaper in the hallways made of . . . velvet?
The problem was, people didn’t appreciate a classic. People had no loyalty!
Nonna had always been saying that.
Nora closed her eyes, thinking of what Nonna might say now. She probably would say that Donny wasn’t people. She would say that she trusted Donny—that Donny, like everyone else in the building who had been her neighbor, her family (no almost about it!), for years and years, would’ve made sure the apartment would be left in good hands, left to someone who understood what it was all about here. In fact, that’s what everyone else in the building seemed to think, too. Nonna, after all, had left her apartment to Nora, because she’d known that Nora would take extra care. She’d known that Nora loved the building as much as she did.
“Maybe he’ll have left it to one of us,” Jonah had said only the week before, during their first building meeting since Donny’s passing. Nora had stood at the front of the room, the concrete floor of the basement laundry room a hard press of reality against the soles of her sneakers. She watched the faces of her neighbors light in hope, and she’d thought of the three unreturned phone calls she’d made to Donny’s attorney.
I think we would’ve already heard, she’d thought. I think we would’ve heard if it was one of us.
But she hadn’t said that. She’d pasted on a smile and said, “I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” clutching the building bylaws in her hand with a sense of impending doom. If it wasn’t one of them, she didn’t know who it could be, because in addition to being quiet and kind, Donny was also, for as long as she’d known him, alone. No girlfriend, no boyfriend, no friends or family outside these walls.
Was 4:00 a.m. too early to try calling that attorney again?
She let out a gusty sigh, rippling the surface of her still mostly undrunk dark roast. The fact of the matter was, it was long past time to stop her 4:00 a.m. fretting. Maybe she needed to go back to list-making for a while, because those unreturned phone calls almost certainly meant something bad was in the offing: some faceless property investment firm was probably combing through Cook County death records even as she ruminated, looking for opportunities to do one of those quick turnaround “flips.” They’d show up and park a dumpster out front and toss all of quiet, kind Donny Pasternak’s things, and they would absolutely complain about the hallway wallpaper (No loyalty! Nonna sniffed, from somewhere). A month later there’d be a “For Sale” sign for Donny’s apartment in the front courtyard with a sticker price that’d start spelling the end for this building that Nonna had made a second life in, this building that had—with a bit of fate and a lot of effort—become a family all its own.
She sighed again—it was a real woe is me situation during this particular golden hour—untucked her feet, and stood from her chair, stretching into a posture that was stiff, upright, preparatory. There had to be something she could do other than simply . . . waiting like this.
But right then, she heard a door slide open somewhere below her.
Nora knew 4:00 a.m.
Nora knew 4:00 a.m. in this building.
And she knew no one—besides her—ever came out onto their balcony at this hour.
No one except.
No one except . . . someone new.
Nora realized that it would be, by all accounts, extremely inappropriate to rush to her balcony railing, hang her head over the side, and ask whomever was down there how they felt about vintage wallpaper. First of all, the sun wasn’t even up yet. Second of all, she was not wearing a bra beneath her pajamas. Third of all,