“I said I was sorry about the garbage disposal! I thought it was the light switch!”
For the next few minutes, they laughed and argued as they made up the couch into Nora’s bed for the night, Dee eventually giving Nora the same lecture she’d given her for the last several nights, which was all about how Nora didn’t take off her makeup at night properly. When Nora finally—after getting yelled at about washcloths a few more times through the bathroom door—settled onto the couch, calling a joking “Good night, Sleeping Beauty!” to Dee, she felt the fatigue from the wine and from the workday settle over her like a blanket. But even as her mind and body sunk closer to sleep, she still thought of Will, the same way she had every night she’d been away—whether he was okay, whether he missed her, whether he’d ever held his phone in his hand, like she had, and thought of calling. She did it now, too, out of habit—swiped her thumb across her screen, navigated to the text box where Will’sGood lucksat like a bad omen.
Maybe she should text something—a few words about how it had gone over the past few days? A question about how his week had been?
But no—no. She was too tired, and it was so late in Chicago. She didn’t want to take the chance on waking him, and anyway, she’d said they should wait. She’d text him when she landed; she wouldn’t force herself to hold off anymore.
She must’ve fallen asleep before setting her phone back down, and she must’ve slept deeply, because when she woke again, it was still clutched in her hand, still resting, face down, on her stomach. She blinked into the darkness, unsure at first what had woken her, until she registered that the phone she was holding was ringing. On instinct, she winced and silenced it, thinking of Dee in the other room. She sat straight up to squint down at the screen while her brain tried to wake up enough to figure out what was going on: how long had she been sleeping, who was calling . . .
Oh.
She smiled down at the screen when she saw: 4:30 a.m., and it was Will.The golden hour, she thought, and she could only blame the fact that she had missed him so much for not thinking of anything else at all.
But when she answered, he only had to speak two words before she knew something was well and truly wrong.
“Nora, baby,” he said.
The good news was, Will was exceptional at delivering bad news.
He’d told her the important things first: that Jonah was okay—in the hospital but okay, and not in any imminent danger at all. He told her that the fall had been the result of a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom and a pair of shoes Jonah had forgotten he’d left in the hallway, and not the result of any underlying balance or consciousness problems. He told her that the largest fracture had been clean—compound, right in the middle of the femur—and that the other three in the hand he’d used to break his fall were, all things considered, not devastating. He told her, too, that Jonah was awake and his mostly regular self, but that he’d need to have surgery soon.
He told her, again and again, that Jonah would be okay.
But the bad news was the bad news: that Jonah had fallen, that he was hurt, that it’d taken about ten minutes for Mr. and Mrs. Salas to wake up when Jonah had used his good hand to thud one of the offending shoes on the floor as a way to call for help.
That Nora had been all the way in California when she’d found out someone she loved was hurt.
“Marian called me from the hospital,” Will explained, while Nora’s heart pounded in the early-morning dark. “She thought I might be able to help, get additional information where I could. She was going to call you, too, but I—I thought it’d be better to wait, with you so far away. Until I could get more information. I hope that’s all right.”
“It’s all right,” she’d said, already scrambling to get her things together. “I’m coming. Tell everyone I’m coming.”
By the time she arrived at the hospital hours later—straight from the airport, her luggage hastily packed in order to catch the earlier flight she’d managed to snag with an assist from Deepa, who hadn’t once complained about the early hour—Nora was a wreck, nervous and stressed even though her phone was filled with regular, reassuring texts from Will, the limpGood luckfrom before long buried.
When she walked through the front doors, she followed the instructions he’d sent her for where to go, barely registering her surroundings. This was the same hospital Nonna had been in, at the end, and she was grateful that Jonah was on a different floor. Still, her hands trembled with nerves as she rode the elevator up, and she had to shake them out before grabbing the handle of her suitcase again, rolling it clumsily behind her as she disembarked, using her free hand to type aHereto Will as she turned out of the elevator bay.
She’d taken only a few steps before she saw him down the corridor, stepping out of the wide doorway that must’ve opened to the family waiting room he’d already told her about, his phone in hand, his head tipped down toward its screen. When he looked up and over, spotting her, he moved so swiftly and so purposefully that she simply stilled in place, as though all the residual stress from her rush to the airport and her long, tense flight finally caught up to her, filling up her body like concrete, like lead.
She set a hand across her eyes, unbearably relieved to be back, and to have Will here, and with the full force of the chin quiver she’d tried so hard to hide last time she’d seen him, she started to cry.
“Nora,” he said, getting close, and then he was surrounding her, his arms encircling her, pulling her close and tight against him.
“He’s okay,” he said, ducking his head to put his mouth closer to her ear.
“He’s okay,” he repeated.
She nodded and kept right on crying, because she was glad Jonah was okay and also upset that he wasn’t, not in the way she wanted him to be. She cried because she hated this hospital and because she missed Nonna. And she cried because this hug, by this particular person, felt about as good as anything she could imagine, and she hadn’t even let herself realize how much—over the course of these past few days—she’d missed being held by him.
“I’ve got food down there for you,” he said softly, and she thought he might’ve said other stuff before that, too, doctor-type stuff, only she hadn’t been paying attention to anything other than his warmth and his strength and his familiar scent for long minutes. “Marian and Emily are here now, and Benny just took Mr. and Mrs. Salas home for the night.”
She nodded against his chest, felt his hand slip down the length of her hair, felt him let out an uneven breath as his arms tightened briefly around her. When he loosened them again, she leaned back so she could look at him even through her tears, and almost as soon as she did he moved, too, lifting his hands from her body so he could gently wipe his thumbs across her cheeks.
“Okay now,” he said softly, and she closed her eyes at the tenderness of it, a few more tears slipping out as she did.
When she opened them again, she could see him better, her eyes drier and her mind calmer, and she smiled softly as she saw his ridiculously messy hair, his slightly crooked glasses. She reached up and straightened them. She wanted to say,I love you, but she also didn’t, not when she felt like a throbbing, raw, exposed nerve, not when she felt like she’d be holding him hostage to her current state of emotional distress.
So instead she said, “I’m glad to see you.”
“Nora, you’ve got no idea.” He breathed in, his lashes lowering, his head tipping down and briefly shaking side to side. “You’ve got no idea how I missed you.”
