told herself. You’re going to drive there, without getting lost, and you’re going to say thank you.
He stopped, and after a step she did, too, turning back to face him. When they’d gotten here, the light was a bright, stunning pink-orange, but now it was nearly dark, the planes of Will’s face lit by the harbor lights in the distance.
“Is this really about the towel rod?” he asked, with his doubtful doctor face on.
It’s about you, she thought, blinking down at the sand, at the soft lapping of the water that stopped short of her feet. It’s about what you told me, and how it made me see things differently. Donny’s apartment, Nonna’s apartment.
Instead, she shrugged and said, “It’s about settling in, I guess. I’ve lived there for a while now, and I’ve been so busy. I think I’m starting to notice that there’s a few things I could do to make things more—”
Mine, her brain supplied automatically, but it felt wrong to say it. Disloyal.
“Convenient,” she finished.
He tucked his hands into his pockets, his brow furrowing. They stared at each other across the stretch of sand and she knew he could tell she wasn’t telling him the full story. But the full story—the story of how she’d spent the last two weeks—felt too complicated, too tentative. Nora wasn’t even sure she understood it herself, really. All she knew was that after Will had gone, she’d waited, caught between some strange feeling of anxiety and anticipation, for someone new to show up downstairs. And when it’d been clear that no one was coming yet—that Will’s quiet efforts at caretaking via her neighbors had extended to his delay with listing Donny’s apartment—she’d almost felt . . . well.
She’d almost felt disappointed.
It wasn’t really that she’d come around to the idea; in fact, breaking the news to her neighbors—in a lousy, impromptu backyard building meeting during which she was still battling her sinuses—had been stressful enough to make her consider bricking over all of Donny’s doors and windows in the hopes that by some miracle everyone would forget it had ever existed. But beneath all that knee-jerk resistance had been something else, too. She understood something about Will now, about how he related to Donny’s apartment, to the building. And losing the battle over the rental—or maybe accepting that she’d lost it to a worthy enemy, for good reasons—had made her think differently about herself and how she related to Nonna’s apartment. If the rental was going forward, she needed to find some way to stay true to Nonna and to her neighbors that didn’t involve keeping every single thing exactly the same. She needed to take control of this new normal.
And maybe, maybe, the right place to start was in the apartment.
Minor changes. Adding a towel rod, and . . . that sort of thing.
“I could help,” he said.
At some point, she must’ve dropped her eyes from his, because now she had to raise her head to look back at him. His posture was exactly the same, but the expression on his face had eased into something more practiced, more casual, and for some reason, it soothed her. That’s how she wanted this to be. A towel rod! Very casual. No real disruptions there.
“You’re probably too busy.” Even as she said it, she hoped he’d put up a fight. Sure, she could make measurements and operate a drill—uh, once she bought one—but for some reason, no matter how nondisruptive a towel rod was, she didn’t quite feel up to doing it alone.
“Won’t take but a minute. I’ve done it once recently.” He added a small, crooked smile. Probably that would’ve looked like a smirk to her, only a few weeks ago. But now it looked like the most gentle, welcome encouragement. “I’ll have to be coming by anyway. I need to put a lockbox on the uni—um. Apartment.”
“Right.” She shifted on her feet, newly uneasy. Would her neighbors think of it as a betrayal, Will coming in and out of her apartment? Their reaction to the news of the rental going forward hadn’t been as extreme as she’d anticipated, but still—their memory of Donny was unchanged, this plan of Will’s seemingly as disrespectful as it was disruptive. To them, she and Will were still on different sides of this thing.
But like always, he seemed to see right through her.
“We can keep it between us,” he said. “It’s not as if we both don’t keep weird hours.”
She couldn’t help her smile, the