If he’d said it in any other way, in any other tone of voice, Nora might’ve figured something else—that Will’s mom wanted to shield him from his dad’s sickness, whatever it had been. But she could tell that’s not what it had been, or at least that’s not what it had been to Will.
“Did she ask you first? I mean . . . if you wanted to go?”
Everything about him was a silhouette, but she could still see him shake his head.
“She didn’t tell me where we were going. A couple days after we got home, I kept not being able to find some of my stuff—my favorite T-shirt, a ball cap I wore a lot. Eventually I realized they were out in the car, in a suitcase she’d packed. She’d forgotten to bring it back in.”
Nora had really never been much one for name-calling. Nonna had always told her that calling someone a bad name was a symptom of a small mind and an even smaller imagination. When someone was rude to Nonna she would say things like, Well, he seemed to be having a bad day! or She must have misplaced her manners this morning!
But right at this moment, Nora felt like she had the smallest mind, the most minuscule imagination. The only available capability of both was to come up with names for Will Sterling’s mother.
“What a—” she began, but at the last, loyal second her long years of Nonna training took over, and she recalibrated. “What about your dad?”
“I don’t know if my dad knew. We never talked about it.”
My parents, they were kind of like yours, he’d said, but for all her desperation to believe it, to bond over it, now she thought that wasn’t so true. Nora’s parents, they’d talked constantly. Months before her first summer here, they’d talked to her about independence and resilience and trying new things; they’d talked to her about how she was “practically” a teenager, about how her dad had gone to summer camps far from home, about how Nora needed to learn to let go of the rigid routines she seemed to cling to. Sometimes Nora thought that all her parents knew how to do was talk.
She’d probably been pretty wrong, to get annoyed with them for that. All families were messy, but Will’s . . . Will’s really did sound like a Dickens novel, or worse.
“When my mother died,” Will said, his voice rough, cautious, and she knew he was about to confess another painful part of this story. “I sent a copy of her obituary here. But he didn’t . . . I never heard from him. I don’t really know why I did it.”
I do, thought Nora, and it felt like her heart broke into a million pieces, thinking of Will, a kid himself, without both of his parents. Reaching out to the person who’d been, apparently, the only family he had, and getting nothing in return.
“Nora,” he said quietly, and she swallowed again, knowing already they’d gone too far with this conversation. She could feel the way it’d led them right back to what they’d been trying to avoid, all through this temporary, allergy-prompted truce.
“Yeah?” she whispered, knowing already what he was about to say.
“I haven’t changed my mind. About the apartment.”
She nodded, wondering if he was watching her silhouette, too.
“I believe everything you say about this place. Everything you showed me.”
She meant to nod again, to stay propped up. But there was a stinging pressure in her head—behind her nose, behind her eyes—and she started sinking, by degrees, back into her pillows. It’s your sinuses, she lied to herself. You probably need more medicine.
“But I can’t be here,” he said, and she closed her eyes against a wave of something so potent, so recognizable, something no medicine could fix. Grief, again. For Nonna. For this place, and the way it would inevitably be different now. For Will.
“This is a place where a lot of things changed for me,” he continued. “And not for the better.”
It was hard to hear it. To hear that her experience of this place—the exact opposite of his, really—wasn’t anything sacred, or anything universal. It was hard to face that something she loved so much, something she’d tried to preserve so much, could be something so painful to someone else. She felt small and naive. She felt chastened.
“Right, of course,” she said. “I get it.”
He cleared his throat, and the mattress shifted again, because—yeah. His