neither curiosity nor assent. Knowing that Mrs. Salas had heard a lot of Nora’s ruminating back and forth today, she tried to quiet herself, but soon enough her unfinished thought swirled inside her like smoke, hot and uncomfortable, until she had to open her mouth again to let it out. “It’s from Italy.”
Mrs. Salas did the hum again, and Nora sighed.
This was difficult, that’s all there was to it, and she had no one to blame but herself.
And maybe also Will.
Nora couldn’t pinpoint what had changed since that night in the conservatory, but something absolutely had. Between them, certainly, things had changed—a layer of caution removed from their interactions, a layer of freedom added in. They no longer only saw each other inside the walls of her apartment, no longer made such a production of the secrecy when they did. If Nora’s neighbors had noticed Will come back to her place that night after their first real date, when the sun hadn’t even gone down fully, no one had said a word. And if they’d noticed that Nora had been going out more than she had in—well, ever—no one said much about that, either.
That she wasn’t stressed over this—that she wasn’t lying awake, worrying over being disloyal—was the change she saw in herself. It wasn’t quite like the smoke that had forced her to declare the provenance of a (actually quite ugly!) lamp she’d inherited from Nonna, but it wasn’t all that different. This feeling, too, wanted out, wanted expression. But it found its way to the surface in other ways: ignoring Austin’s calls when they came in after eight. Telling Dee about LA. Painting that tiny bathroom all on her own, before Will even had a chance to come over and join her. Packing up her laptop and doing a half day of work at a coffee shop five blocks away.
Reading about a neighborhood charity sale and deciding to let go of a few things.
I guess I always had two lives, she’d told Will that night, and ever since she’d said it, she hadn’t quite been able to let go of it. When she’d come back to Chicago, she thought she was settling in to one of them, finally and for good. But everything that had happened since she met Will all those weeks ago now suggested something different to her—that she hadn’t so much settled into her own life as she had settled into someone else’s. That had been comfortable, and comforting, because it’s what all her summers here had always been: patterning out the days like Nonna did, loving all the things Nonna did.
Of course she’d started to know all this before the night at the conservatory; maybe she’d even started to know it sooner, during those lonely golden hours way back in the winter when she’d started to work through her grief. Something about what Will had told her, though—that he’d seen her, all those years ago, that there was some alternate version of her summer stories here that might have included Will Sterling—it had crystallized everything.
Two lives wasn’t what she wanted anymore.
She wanted one. With more patterns she would make for herself. With more loves she would choose for herself.
But it was easier to want things than it was to do them, sometimes.
“Maybe I should keep it,” Nora said. “If it seems like no one would buy it.”
“Someone’ll buy it,” said Benny, stepping up to drop a brightly colored throw pillow into the decor bin. “Probably the same kind of person who’d buy this pillow.”
“I bought you that pillow!” gasped Mrs. Salas. “For Secret Santa, two years ago!”
Nora stifled a laugh. Secret Santa was rarely a secret in this building. Plus that pillow had There’s No Place Like Home embroidered on it. It could only have come from Mrs. Salas.
“Oh,” said Benny quickly, bending down again. “I guess I grabbed the wrong—”
Mrs. Salas interrupted him with a heavy sigh and a hand on his arm. “Never mind. We’re keeping everything in the bins. I didn’t spend forty-five minutes arguing with my husband so he could come back down and try to get this silly helicopter out of here.”
The silly helicopter—remote operated, lots of “horsepower,” according to Mr. Salas—was probably the item in the boxes that would fetch the most money. But Nora definitely wasn’t going to say that, especially because if he’d given it up he was probably right now upstairs in his workroom building something that Mrs. Salas would find even more annoying.