If there’d been a bright spot, it’d been her post-meeting debrief with Dee, who had to retouch her brows after a rare moment of rubbing them in frustration when the client had brought up the bitmoji again. Dee fully expected to leave that conference room and get treated to Austin’s bad mood for the rest of the afternoon, so Nora—with no small amount of remote-work survivor’s guilt—did her best to fill her friend’s time, even if it did mean she had to answer fourteen questions about what Will Sterling looked like.

When the workday was over, that’s when the real waiting set in. She and Will had decided that he’d come by around 10:00 p.m., when her neighbors would almost certainly have turned in for the night, especially since the Cubs weren’t playing, and that had seemed like an exciting, clandestine idea during their lakeside rendezvous. But getting up before dawn made 10:00 p.m. a dim prospect on normal days, and so Nora had to fill her remaining waiting hours with keeping herself awake: a strong coffee; a shower; at one particularly low point, a few light slaps on her cheeks as she stood in front of the bathroom mirror.

Come on, she told herself, or told the setting sun, or possibly told the yet-to-arrive Will. Dimly she was aware that nothing about her impatience suggested a casual engagement with their planned project. But as the sky turned dark again, as the building quieted and the clock ticked down the minutes, she accepted the excitement that coursed through her body as her due.

It felt good to be excited.

At 9:59, there was a soft knock at the door, and the secret-keeping nature of their meeting meant that Nora didn’t even have to stall before answering. She opened the door and hoped the waiting didn’t show all over her face, and Will Sterling stood there in his glasses, one hand holding a toolbox and the other holding two bags from the hardware store, and he looked so easy and unbothered that for a second she had the sinking feeling he hadn’t been waiting at all.

Still, she smiled (unbothered!) in greeting, stepping back so he could come inside. He set down his stuff and then held up a finger and retreated into the hallway again. When he came back, he was bearing the biggest towel rod Nora had ever seen.

“Uh,” she said, once she’d closed the door behind him. “That—”

“It’s for a shower curtain,” he clarified immediately, setting it onto the floor. “Like the one I put in downstairs. It’s got this curve to it, see, so when you’re in the shower it feels bigger in there. It matches the towel rod I picked up, and they’re pretty much right next to each other in the aisle, and . . .”