He tucked his hands into his pockets, his brow furrowing. They stared at each other across the stretch of sand and she knew he could tell she wasn’t telling him the full story. But the full story—the story of how she’d spent the last two weeks—felt too complicated, too tentative. Nora wasn’t even sure she understood it herself, really. All she knew was that after Will had gone, she’d waited, caught between some strange feeling of anxiety and anticipation, for someone new to show up downstairs. And when it’d been clear that no one was coming yet—that Will’s quiet efforts at caretaking via her neighbors had extended to his delay with listing Donny’s apartment—she’d almost felt . . . well.

She’d almost felt disappointed.

It wasn’t really that she’d come around to the idea; in fact, breaking the news to her neighbors—in a lousy, impromptu backyard building meeting during which she was still battling her sinuses—had been stressful enough to make her consider bricking over all of Donny’s doors and windows in the hopes that by some miracle everyone would forget it had ever existed. But beneath all that knee-jerk resistance had been something else, too. She understood something about Will now, about how he related to Donny’s apartment, to the building. And losing the battle over the rental—or maybe accepting that she’d lost it to a worthy enemy, for good reasons—had made her think differently about herself and how she related to Nonna’s apartment. If the rental was going forward, she needed to find some way to stay true to Nonna and to her neighbors that didn’t involve keeping every single thing exactly the same. She needed to take control of this new normal.

And maybe, maybe, the right place to start was in the apartment.

Minor changes. Adding a towel rod, and . . . that sort of thing.

“I could help,” he said.

At some point, she must’ve dropped her eyes from his, because now she had to raise her head to look back at him. His posture was exactly the same, but the expression on his face had eased into something more practiced, more casual, and for some reason, it soothed her. That’s how she wanted this to be. A towel rod! Very casual. No real disruptions there.

“You’re probably too busy.” Even as she said it, she hoped he’d put up a fight. Sure, she could make measurements and operate a drill—uh, once she bought one—but for some reason, no matter how nondisruptive a towel rod was, she didn’t quite feel up to doing it alone.