“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 atenant. 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 to get him to agree to the telework.”
Will dropped his head in a nod. “Right, yeah.”
They fell into silence, and Nora felt ludicrously disappointed: everything good between them tonight ground to a halt with this additional disruption to their routine.See, Dee?she telegraphed, to her long-distance friend, a friend she’d just been asked to keep a secret from.We’re definitelynotdating.
Will cleared his throat. “Is he—” He shifted against the doorframe. “Is he all right to you, though? Your boss?”
She opened her mouth to answer—a quick, uncomplicated yes. But that Will had asked at all made her close it again before frowning down at her hands and thinking. Even if her answer was basically going to be the same, she wanted to at least consider the question.
“He is, yeah. He’s going through something, I think, which probably has to do with whatever this move idea is about. But he’s a good boss. I owe him a lot.”
His answer was a quiet noise: not quite assent, not quite disagreement. Acknowledgment, and nothing more.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I left you sitting out there for so long.”
He shrugged. “I did the dishes. Started reading the instruction manual for the light fixture.”
God, she did not feel like installing a light fixture tonight. Not now, not after everything. In fact at the moment she felt like building a time machine and going back to the minutes before her phone had started ringing. If she could do it again, she probably would ask him to call herbaby, no matter how guilty it would make her feel later.
“I’ll be honest,” he said. “I doubt I’ve got the hand-eye coordination for working with electricity tonight.”
Given her own feelings about the whole thing, she should have been relieved. But instead she was unaccountably disappointed now that there wasn’t a reason for him to stay.
“Yeah, of course. It’s so late.”
She turned to her desk, closed her notebook, fished her phone out from the space it’d fallen into behind her keyboard. When she swiveled back so she could stand, though, she found Will had taken a step into the room and now held out a hand to her.
She looked at it, then up at him, returning his soft, inside-joke smile. When she slid her palm against his, he grabbed hold of her and pulled her up to him.This, she thought, when she landed against his body, his other arm steadying her around the waist.This is the direction you want to be tugged in.
He kept tugging, in fact—kept hold of her hand while he walked her down the hall, past the bathroom and to the doorway of her bedroom. She halted him at the threshold, confused. “You’re not going?”
He looked down at her. “Do you want me to?”
