Will stood from the bench, heedless of Gerald’s general discomfort with his height. He paced back and forth in front of it, running his hands through his hair.
“I’ve been trying to . . .” He trailed off, shook his head. “I’ve been trying to keep it sosafewith her. To just . . . fix things for her. To put limits on how I am with her. So I wouldn’t—”
“You won’t,” Gerald interrupted. “You are a different person than your parents were people. I feel quite assured of this.”
Will stopped pacing, put his hands on his hips. “Iam,” he said, and for the first time, he actually believed it. He thought of Nora in her bathroom, her lit-up eyes every time they put in a new bathroom fixture. The pleasure she took in new things, when she let herself. “And she is, too. I mean, different from how she—”
“Obviously, I’m keeping up,” Gerald deadpanned.
In spite of his shitty night of sleep, Will suddenly felt alive with energy, his head swimming with this revelation, this perspective. He loved Nora, and it wasn’t rash, or reckless, or selfish to feel it. Tosayit. To live it for the rest of his life, if she’d let him. He was not his parents. He didn’t have to love the way he’d seen love at first.
“Gerald, I absolutely have to go. I’ve got to make a list of my failings, or something.”
“Don’t do that. It is very clear that your problems aren’t mine.”
“Right,” Will said, momentarily deflated. “Right.”
Gerald looked down at his watch. “A bit longer than the ten minutes you requested,” he said.
Will couldn’t help but laugh. “Of course. I’ve kept you too long. I appreciate you—”
Gerald waved a hand in dismissal. “No need,” he said, looking flustered. “I’ll certainly expect to see you back at work to-morrow.”
Will nodded, somehow comforted by this return to Gerald’s particular brand of professional rectitude. “Certainly,” he echoed.
“Very good,” Gerald said, and turned on his heel to head back inside.
But watching him go, Will had an impulse—sudden and sharp, the kind of feeling he’d trained himself to ignore for years and years, the kind of feeling he’d long told himself he ought to avoid. He wondered how many opportunities he’d missed in life like this, all because he was afraid of being rash or reckless or selfish.
Hell, he thought.Why not?
“Gerry,” he called, and waited to get fired.
His boss stilled, and Will held his breath.
But then Gerald turned around, his eyebrows raised. “Yes?”
“I’m sure this isn’t very professional,” he said, pausing to clear his throat. “But I think you might be my best friend.”
There was a long, painful second of silence across the parking lot, during which Will thought he might die of embarrassment, right at the moment he’d finally gotten his life figured out.
And then Gerald Abraham reached up and smoothed his lapel.
“Well, Will,” Gerry answered, moving to tuck his hands into the pockets of his perfectly pressed, pristine white coat, “since we’re out here in the parking lot, I think it is fine for me to say that the feeling is entirely mutual.”
Chapter 19
Nora hadn’t expected the blood.
Inside Jonah’s apartment, she stared down at the dried patch of it, a circle that probably wasn’t any bigger than her hand. Still, it chilled her, seeing it there, bringing to mind the way Jonah had looked this morning, as though he’d taken a terrible beating. She’d wanted to ask Will about that—the darkness of the bruising, the way it’d seemed to take up so much space even though Jonah had sworn he’d only struck the edge of his brow when he’d gone down.
She shook her head, frustrated with herself. It didn’t matter. She should clean this up, pack Jonah’s bag, get moving so she could get back there. She knew Mrs. Salas would want to go with her, could smell the aroma of her baking all throughout the building, and thought she must’ve been making Jonah’s favorites. Benny, too, was planning to head back today; she’d seen him in the hallway on the way up, had ignored the quizzical look he’d given her as she’d insisted on dragging her suitcase up the steps entirely by herself.
Within minutes she was on her knees, scrubbing gently at the stain and blinking back the tears that kept stubbornly pressing behind her eyes. When she thought she’d mostly handled it, she stood, dumping the bucket of water into Jonah’s tub, averting her eyes even when she rinsed her sponge. She stripped off her gloves and looked around. Should she try to tidy up? Make his bed so that when he came back—
She swallowed, flushing with heat.
It’s a third-floor unit, Will had said to the doctor, so plain and so technical, and it had felt like having the wind taken out of her once again, when she wasn’t even recovered from seeing Jonah there, and like that. The worst of it was, she’d spent the next few minutes trying to get her breath back, trying to remind herself that Will was only saying what was true, even if she’d hated the way he’d said it.
