“Why would she . . . why would she take you to someone you didn’t even know?” Nora had always known Nonna, even before the summer stays started. There wasn’t a week of Nora’s life that hadn’t included some interaction with her—a phone call, a card in the mail, the occasional visit.

“She wanted to be with my dad, for the time he had. The two of them.”

If he’d said it in any other way, in any other tone of voice, Nora might’ve figured something else—that Will’s mom wanted to shield him from his dad’s sickness, whatever it had been. But she could tell that’s not what it had been, or at least that’s not what it had been to Will.

“Did she ask you first? I mean . . . if you wanted to go?”

Everything about him was a silhouette, but she could still see him shake his head.

“She didn’t tell me where we were going. A couple days after we got home, I kept not being able to find some of my stuff—my favorite T-shirt, a ball cap I wore a lot. Eventually I realized they were out in the car, in a suitcase she’d packed. She’d forgotten to bring it back in.”

Nora had really never been much one for name-calling. Nonna had always told her that calling someone a bad name was a symptom of a small mind and an even smaller imagination. When someone was rude to Nonna she would say things like, Well, he seemed to be having a bad day! or She must have misplaced her manners this morning!

But right at this moment, Nora felt like she had the smallest mind, the most minuscule imagination. The only available capability of both was to come up with names for Will Sterling’s mother.

“What a—” she began, but at the last, loyal second her long years of Nonna training took over, and she recalibrated. “What about your dad?”

“I don’t know if my dad knew. We never talked about it.”

My parents, they were kind of like yours, he’d said, but for all her desperation to believe it, to bond over it, now she thought that wasn’t so true. Nora’s parents, they’d talked constantly. Months before her first summer here, they’d talked to her about independence and resilience and trying new things; they’d talked to her about how she was “practically” a teenager, about how her dad had gone to summer camps far from home, about how Nora needed to learn to let go of the rigid routines she seemed to cling to. Sometimes Nora thought that all her parents knew how to do was talk.

She’d probably been pretty wrong, to get annoyed with them for that. All families were messy, but Will’s . . . Will’s really did sound like a Dickens novel, or worse.