Then, when she nodded, he looked up again and let his eyes pass over the one room in her apartment he’d not yet been in. Her grandmother’s most personal things, plus Nora’s tiny workspace. When his eyes landed back on her again, he maintained the furrow. He said, “What happened?” and it felt like he was asking her about so much more than the phone call.
She sighed and swiveled her chair toward him, this time concentrating enough not to run into anything.
“Austin—that’s my boss—he wants me to come back to San Diego next month.”
For the briefest of seconds, something about Will’s body changed, even though his posture remained exactly the same. But Nora saw it—a tightening. A tension.
“What for?” he said, his voice light.
She sighed, overwhelmed. Will knew a bit about her work (and rework) for the influencer, but now, everything went beyond today’s loss of the account. Everything was so much more complicated.
“A week of meetings, I guess. A few new pitches he wants me there in person for, and”—she shook her head, still in shock about this part—“some talk of moving the whole business to Los Angeles.”
This is between us for now, Austin had said, which Nora knew meant something specific: she was not meant to tell Deepa about it.
“Is that a problem for you?”
Nora tilted her head, thinking about it. “It would have been, I guess, a year ago—I wouldn’t have wanted to go to LA. Now that I’m here I guess it won’t matter so much for me in the everyday, except I think what it means is that Austin is changing direction, and it’s . . . I don’t know. These pitches are going to be a lot of work.”
More of the same—a celebrity who was starting an ecotourism foundation. A retired pro surfer getting into documentary film production. A vegan home chef who’d recently gone viral on social media. There was nothing wrong with the work, but it certainly wasn’t what she was used to. And Austin wasn’t giving her much time to pivot. She stared morosely at the mess in front of her, the open notebook where she’d hastily taken notes on what Austin was saying.
“You don’t have much space of your own in here,” Will said, and she looked up at him.
Only a few weeks ago, this comment might have made her feel flustered, angry. But by now—from the bathroom projects alone—she knew Will understood that every change she made in this apartment was significant to her. And by now she knew that he—even in spite of his own apparent lack of sentiment when it came to family heirlooms—didn’t judge her for it. A few days ago, he’d indulged her dozens of back-and-forth texts about the new sink faucet for the bathroom, Nora hesitant to pick anything too modern. Whatever you want, he’d text back, and every time, she liked it. Every time, she felt like he saw her.
“This room would be hard to change,” she said, casting her eyes around. Nonna’s bed and dresser, both from the year she’d been married: 1944, when she’d only been nineteen years old. Her lace coverlet, yellowed with age, purchased the year she’d moved to this building: 1990, when she was a widow of barely a year. A jeweled hairbrush and hand mirror, resting atop a silver tray that Nora dusted every week. Old pictures in elaborate frames. An infant Jesus of Prague statue on a small, delicate-looking table over in the corner. None of it was to Nora’s taste, really, but she loved it all the same, because Nonna had loved it.
And this is Nonna’s place.
She looked down at her lap, discomfited at the intruding thought. She had a familiar sense of being tugged in all directions. San Diego, Chicago. Austin, Deepa. Nonna, herself.
“You ever think about one of those coworking spaces?” Will asked, and their eyes met again.
“Like where you rent an office?”
“Yeah. My tenant downstairs uses one. You could ask her about it.”
“Oh, I—” Her own brow furrowed, considering. At first, not so much about the idea itself, but about the thought of going down two flights of stairs and knocking on the door of a person Will called a tenant. In Donny’s old apartment! She felt tangled up with the tugging sensation, tried to ignore it.
Anyway, a coworking space, that was definitely out of the question, no matter who she knew or didn’t know who used one.
“Austin wouldn’t pay for that,” Nora said. “It was already a leap