So, she thought, making it a declaration of her own. She would not break first. She would stand here where it felt like the air got thinner and thinner between them, where it felt like her body buzzed with strange, stifling confusion: a cocktail of anger and attraction, disappointment and excitement.
She would not break first.
When his phone beeped again, she held herself still. But when he moved to pull it from his pocket, looking at the screen, she let herself breathe a sigh of relief. A win by default was still a win.
“I need to go,” he said, but she could tell it cost him, to be the one who had to walk away.
Good, she thought, relishing the thought that her neighbors would see him retreat. When he turned from her and started making his way toward the back fence, she felt a surge of reckless, unearned confidence.
“I won’t make it easy for you!” she called toward him.
He stilled in place. When he turned around, he seemed to look past her, toward the building, toward its balconies. She wondered if he could see her neighbors there, watching them both. That smile—no,smirk—played again on his mouth, and she thought (she couldn’t believe she thought!) that she’d like to kiss that expression right off his face.
“It’s a good thing, then,” he called back, his voice carrying across the yard. “It’s a good thing I’m not used to easy.”
Chapter 4
It was easier, frankly, to think of her as an enemy.
Will had a lot of experience with enemies. Not people, not exactly, though he guessed if he thought about it hard enough, the man in whose apartment he was standing would probably qualify. No, Will’s enemies had always been bigger, more . . . institutional. School systems, government programs, billing departments, that sort of thing. Becoming a doctor meant that he’d managed to keep these deep-seated blood feuds from his adolescence alive into his adulthood, though he supposed he had a more experienced perspective now. Still, when he’d been younger, full of fear and sadness and anger, having adversaries had helped him focus, helped him survive. Nothing was complicated when you had an enemy. It was you versus them, and you versus them stopped you thinking about the other problem, which was usually something more like: you versus you.
You versus your fear. You versus your sadness. You versus your anger.
So with Nora—the girl on the balcony after all, it seemed—it would have to be him versus her, and not him versus his memory of her. Not him versus his attraction to her. Not him versus his boyish, reckless feelings for her.
In the two days since he’d walked away from her, he’d worked on it, this perspective. Instead of thinking about the way she’d looked up close—that long ponytail and those light blue eyes—he’d gone to big-box hardware stores, buying paint and trays and rollers. Instead of thinking about what she’d said—about protecting Donny, about this godforsaken pile of bricks being some kind of “family”—he researched haul-away companies and mattress deliveries and cleaning services. Instead of thinking about how he’d felt in that basement—unsure, unbalanced, unwanted—he’d scrolled through pages of similar-sized rentals in the neighborhood, drafting three different versions of the unit description he’d post when the time came. He got invested.
And getting invested made it possible to think of her and her neighbors as an institution all on their own. An easy enemy, then. Nothing personal about it.
When he’d arrived back at the building this morning, he’d prepared himself for confrontation, half expecting that there’d be some kind of notice taped on Donny’s door. A cease-and-desist, maybe, or at least a hastily scrawled “KEEP OUT” sign. But nothing greeted him, not even the flick of curtains in the front windows as he’d walked up, a stack of flattened boxes tucked under his arm. In the hall, even the cherub sconces seemed indifferent, not that it was healthy for him to imagine otherwise. And now, inside Donny’s apartment, the silence was deafening—he couldn’t even hear footsteps in the unit above him.
Well, fine, then, a freeze-out. That made it even easier.
He started in the kitchen, because he figured that would be easy, too—he doubted he’d find anything too personal there, and he had a good list from Sally’s binder about what essentials he’d need to have for renters. He put on an emergency-medicine podcast he liked, an episode about compartment syndrome he’d been meaning to listen to, and started sorting. Keep, donate, toss.
Easy.
Until there was a knock on his door.
He almost missed it, what with the sound of pots and pans shifting and also the voice of a woman through his phone speaker describing—in great, gory detail—the right technique for a fasciotomy. But when he raised his head he heard it again, a definite knock, and also the sound of murmured, feminine voices.
The institution arrives, he thought, controlling his breathing as he stepped around various piles of junk.Don’t think of her as Nora.
When he opened the door, the doctor on the podcast was saying “infected surgical bulge” and there were two familiar faces—neither of them Nora’s—staring up at him from the threshold, each holding dishes covered in aluminum foil.
“Uh,” he said, over the podcast host’s commentary on pus color. “Let me—” He stepped back and shut it off. Whatever they were carrying smelled like bacon and carbohydrates, which meant hewasgetting an institution, of a sort: the Midwestern welcome and/or bereavement wagon. It didn’t look all that much like an enemy cavalry had arrived, unless there were laxatives baked into those dishes.
“Sorry about that,” he said, adding an embarrassed smile, because if this was a peacekeeping mission, he was going to turn the charm offensive back on. Easy enough, when it wasn’t Nora standing there.
“We’ve brought you some dishes!” one of the women said, the one whose hand he shook in the basement. She was wearing lipstick so bright red he could almost hear it. “I’m your upstairs neighbor, Corrine Salas, and—” She paused, nudging the woman beside her with an elbow. When that produced nothing in the way of a reaction, she spoke again. “And this is Marian Goodnight, who lives across the hall from you.” Another nudge.
“Not sure if you’ll have much of an appetite,” Mrs. Goodnight said abruptly, holding out her dish and nodding toward his phone. “If that’s the kind of thing you’re listening to.”
“That must be an occupational hazard,” said Mrs. Salas excitedly. “Nora mentioned you’re adoctor! Now if I could scoot right by you here to set this dish down. . . .”
And before he could say anything, that’s exactly what she’d done—moved past him in a cloud of perfume and chatter, her companion silently (and unscentedly) following her lead into the kitchen, pushing aside his Keep, Donate, and Toss boxes. It took a minute to realize that the two covered dishes were only the start, that each of them had also been carrying bags over their shoulders, and were now also unpacking those.
“Now these things will keep nicely,” Mrs. Salas said, not really to him, not really to anyone, so far as he could tell. Her eyes and hands were busy on the absolutely insane amount of food that was being stacked up onto Donny’s stained laminate countertops. “So I’ll pop them in your freezer. As for this Tupperware, the red tops can stay on the counter, and the blue should be refrigerated, though I suppose if you’re not going to eat the red tops within a couple of days, you could refrigerate them, too.”
