Eight months on and 4:00 a.m. had become habit, a secret practice she’d even put a name to. At night, when she got in bed, she’d open the clock app on her phone and toggle on the alarm she’d titled “Golden Hour.” She’d close her eyes and look forward to it, to the reset it always seemed to provide her, to the gentle welcome it always seemed to give her to the day ahead.

Four in the morning, she’d started to think, could fix pretty much anything.

Except.

Except for this.

It’d been two and a half weeks since it’d happened, and every day since, Nora had spent 4:00 a.m. exactly like she was right now: sitting on the balcony, still in her pajamas, fretting.

And it was all Donny Pasternak’s fault.

Nora knew it was a terrible thing to think, a terrible thing to feel. Who could blame a man for dying, after all, especially a man so quiet and kind as Donny? Who could sit in judgment of someone—a neighbor, a friend, practically a family member—who’d left this world so suddenly, so unexpectedly, so prematurely? Who could be so . . . so angry?

Well, the answer was Nora.

Nora could.

You’re not angry at Donny, she scolded herself. You know that’s not it.

She took a sip of her coffee, trying to get that golden hour feeling again. It was a perfect not-quite-morning, warm and dry and pleasant, the kind she’d waited for all through her first dark, brutal Chicago winter.

But it didn’t work.

She was angry. She was angry and stressed and scared, because quiet, kind Donny Pasternak was gone, and that was bad enough, especially so soon after Nonna. But beyond that—beyond that, there was the terrible realization that being Donny’s neighbor and friend and almost family member turned out to mean exactly nothing when it came to finding out what would happen to his apartment.

Nora had never been naive about how outsiders judged the old, brick, blocky six-flat that was, for the first time in her adult life, her full-time home, though the precise nature of the judgments had changed over the years. When she’d first come to visit, her parents had spent the whole drive from the airport speaking quietly—well, not that quietly—to each other about Nonna wasting years of money and effort on this “little building” when she could’ve stayed in her perfectly nice, paid-off house in the suburbs after her husband, Nora’s grandfather, passed. Two decades later and the judgments were different: Wasn’t it the most dated-looking building on the block? Shouldn’t it try to do a little better to keep up? Hadn’t anyone considered making it brighter, more modern? Was that striped wallpaper in the hallways made of . . . velvet?

The problem was, people didn’t appreciate a classic. People had no loyalty!