“It’s okay,” she repeated, feeling her own lips curve into a smile.
“It means something different in my line of work. The golden hour, I mean.”
“You’re a photographer?” That was the only other context in which she’d heard the phrase—something about the light at a specific time of day. A time of day that was not, of course, 4:00 a.m.
The grin—and the confidence—faded. “Uh. No. Never mind. It’s not . . . very pleasant.”
Now it was Nora’s turn to tilt her head in interest. What could be unpleasant about a phrase like the golden hour, in any context?
“What do you mean?”
Definitely after this she would find a way to bring up Donny. Absolutely she would.
His chest rose on an inhale before he spoke again. When he finally did, he seemed almost sheepish. Apologetic.
“It’s what we call the hour after someone’s been injured. Uh, traumatically injured. It’s the time where you have . . . it’s the best window you have to treat them.”
“Oh.” She lowered her eyes from his face, took in a detail that made more sense to her now. Those weren’t pajamas he was wearing; they were hospital scrubs. “You’re a doctor?”
“Yeah.”
Wow, good thing Mrs. Salas from 2B wasn’t up. Nora could practically hear her now. A doctor, Nora! she would say. Wouldn’t you like to marry a doctor?
Nora cleared her throat again, course-corrected that train of thought. She should bring up Donny. Now was as good a time as any.
Instead, she said, “Do you work nights?”
“I work whenever,” he said, and she thought she could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “I work all the time.”
He sounded so . . . defeated, the way he said that. So weary. She opened her mouth to say something—that she was sorry, that it sounded difficult. But he spoke before she could.
“Do you?”
“Do I work all the time?”
He smiled up at her, a different one, this time. She thought it looked like a sunrise, this smile, for all that it was still dark around them. It shined out every other thought in her head: Donny, the apartment, the building.
“Do you work nights?” he clarified.
“Oh, no. I’m an early riser, I guess. I work during the day. From home.”
He hadn’t asked that, had he? But suddenly, to Nora, this conversation had taken a golden-hour quality all its own. Secret and special and hers alone.
“Oh yeah?” he said, that delicious note of interest in his voice. He reached up and adjusted his glasses, and in that second Nora let herself be absurdly, giddily attracted to him. She almost missed it when he asked his next question.
“What do you do?”
She smiled down at him, shifting her feet against the wood in something like anticipation. She hadn’t had an opportunity to talk about, really talk about, her work, with someone who wasn’t an actual coworker, in a long time. She liked what she did, for all the headaches it had given her recently, what with her new situation and all. All right. She would answer this one question, then she would bring up Donny.
“I design w—”
But before she could finish, a scream rent the air.
“What the hell?” the man said, his head snapping to the side, out toward the inky-black no-longer night.
Nora couldn’t help it.
She laughed.
He looked back up at her, his hand coming to his chest again, that same gentle rub over his heart. Easily startled, this tall, handsome, bespectacled man, and she was so . . . delighted by that. So thoroughly, completely charmed.
“It’s a cat,” she said, the laugh still in her voice. “A stray. Probably one of the big toms.”
Her laughter faded as she realized something. She hadn’t heard them in a couple of weeks, not since . . .
“Donny,” she blurted.
The man on the balcony dropped his hand away from his heart.
There was a long, awkward pause, during which Nora’s soul certainly left her body. Not sticking around for this! it probably said, adding a cheerful wave as it went.
She cleared her throat. “He—um. He used to put food out for them.”
The pause that followed was even longer. Even awkward-er. What a terrible way to bring up the condolences conversation.
The man turned his head again, out toward the yard, out toward where the frustrated feline scream had come from, his hands curling around the balcony railing again, as though he needed to ground himself. She was desperate to say something, anything, but she also wanted to give him a minute, if he needed it. God knows she’d needed a lot