He watched her throat bob in a swallow. “Yes.” And then, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wasn’t sure at first. Not until that building meeting, when you mentioned you came in the summers,” he said, but that wasn’t really true. Hadn’t he been sure, from the moment he’d heard her say Hey? From the moment she’d looked over the edge of her balcony, down to his? “And then . . .” He trailed off, an echo of Nora before. Donny, he could have said again. Me.

She shook her head, dropping her eyes to her skirt, smoothing it again. “I wish you would have said something.”

“It felt complicated, with the building.” Another half-truth. He felt complicated. From the second he saw her again, he was all complication.

“I mean back then. When you saw me the first time.”

“Oh. Well, I almost did. I almost called up to you.”

He could remember it so clearly, all of a sudden—all the things his teenaged mind had run through, trying to think of something to say to her while she rained tomatoes down on his head. Hey, did you drop something? That’s what he’d settled on, in the end.

He felt an unfamiliar tenderness for his teenaged self.

“I would’ve wanted you to,” Nora said. “I always wanted to meet kids my own age here.”

“I would’ve been a little older, I guess. Two years?”

She nodded and smiled. “That would have made it even better. I would’ve bragged when I got back to school. The cute high school guy who flirted with me over the summer.”

She took a step down, bringing herself closer to him, and it hit him almost as sharp as the moment with her phone and the fly and her laughing frustration. What he would’ve given, to see her up close that day. What he would’ve given, for one more selfish summer before everything had gone to hell.

Her smile slipped during his silence, and she paused, two steps away. “Then again,” she said, “At thirteen, I was in a pretty awkward phase, so maybe you—”

“I thought you were beautiful,” he said fiercely, because he wouldn’t let anything else stand.

She reached up, touched the edge of his glasses like he had only a moment ago. “I thought you said you couldn’t see me.”

Another out, but he didn’t take this one, either.

“I could, somehow. Your laugh, your voice. I could see you well enough.”