“Nora, then,” he said after a beat, and as it turned out, she didn’t like that much better, primarily because she immediately liked it way too much—the way he said it, the way he looked at her when he said it.
Like heknewher.
Beneath her shirt, she felt warm with . . . annoyance? Yes, she would definitely settle on annoyance. No other feelings options allowed.
“What you need to know,” she began, because thinking about her neighbors’ instructions absolutely made her feel less . . . annoyed, “is that this building can’t really accommodate what you’ve outlined in your letter.”
“I don’t see why not. I have a unit I don’t intend to live in. I have a permit to rent it on a short-term basis. It’s accommodated.”
Okay, now she wasgenuinelyannoyed, not lying-to-herself annoyed. “It’s not about your . . . yourunit.” Her cheeks heated. Why didunitsound so off-color when she said it? A mystery! She rushed on. “It’s about the people who live here.Wecan’t accommodate it.”
“It’s not for you to accommodate. As I said in the letter, I’ll maintain the unit, and I’ll do my best to make sure—”
“You won’t be able to do that. You live all the way across town, and you work all the time. You said it yourself.”
Something ticked in his jaw. “I’m not here to make trouble for anyone.”
“Youare, though. You have to understand”—Good, she thought,remember your lines—“you have to understand that this building is really unique. Everyone who lives here has lived here for a long time, and we—”
“Right. Twenty years for you, was it?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Whatever, yes! Twenty years, though I don’t see why it matters so much to you. In any case, I know everything you don’t about this place, and I’m telling you, you’ll be causing a lot of difficulty for the people who live here.”
“But you don’t.”
She blinked. “I don’t what?”
“You don’t know everything. For example, you clearly didn’t know that it’s not on the prohibited-buildings list for short-term rentals.”
Okay, that was at least two points to him, if she wanted to update Marian on the score later. He was right; that was the worst of it. He was completely right.
But still. Still, twenty years! She had to remember that she knew lots of things he didn’t.
And she intended to use them.
“I know you said you didn’t know your uncle well,” she said, and almost immediately the look in his eyes changed—all that confidence gone with a blink, replaced at first with something cautious and vulnerable, and then, when she finished her sentence, something determined and hard.
“But I did. And he wouldn’t have wanted this. He really loved that apartment.”
He stared at her. Nothing like the starlit gaze from the other morning.
Nothing like that at all.
“I’ve heard,” he said flatly.
“It’s only that,” she said, not really minding the note of pleading in her voice, “we’re afamily.”
For a second, she thought it might’ve worked. He dropped his eyes to the grass and shifted his feet. She thought he might’ve even nodded his head.
But if he did, it wasn’t in agreement.
“Well, Nora,” he said (shedid! not! like it!), raising his glasses-free, sympathy-free eyes to hers. “I’m not really a member of your family. So.”
So?
Thatso—it sounded to Nora like a declaration. Whatever soft conversation they’d started with on their balconies, there was no going back to that. They were on different sides now.
Around them, the backyard seemed unusually still, unusually quiet, and she had the sense that they were being watched—that everyone had gone back to their apartments, pressing their curious, concerned faces against their back doors to see how Nora would handle this.
