She smiled down at him, shifting her feet against the wood in something like anticipation. She hadn’t had an opportunity to talk about, really talk about, her work, with someone who wasn’t an actual coworker, in a long time. She liked what she did, for all the headaches it had given her recently, what with her new situation and all. All right. She would answer this one question, then she would bring up Donny.

“I design w—”

But before she could finish, a scream rent the air.

“What the hell?” the man said, his head snapping to the side, out toward the inky-black no-longer night.

Nora couldn’t help it.

She laughed.

He looked back up at her, his hand coming to his chest again, that same gentle rub over his heart. Easily startled, this tall, handsome, bespectacled man, and she was so . . . delighted by that. So thoroughly, completely charmed.

“It’s a cat,” she said, the laugh still in her voice. “A stray. Probably one of the big toms.”

Her laughter faded as she realized something. She hadn’t heard them in a couple of weeks, not since . . .

“Donny,” she blurted.

The man on the balcony dropped his hand away from his heart.

There was a long, awkward pause, during which Nora’s soul certainly left her body. Not sticking around for this! it probably said, adding a cheerful wave as it went.

She cleared her throat. “He—um. He used to put food out for them.”

The pause that followed was even longer. Even awkward-er. What a terrible way to bring up the condolences conversation.

The man turned his head again, out toward the yard, out toward where the frustrated feline scream had come from, his hands curling around the balcony railing again, as though he needed to ground himself. She was desperate to say something, anything, but she also wanted to give him a minute, if he needed it. God knows she’d needed a lot of minutes, over the last few months. That’s what 4:00 a.m. was good for, wasn’t it? The poor guy.

It nagged at her, a little, that she’d never seen him before, never heard Donny mention him. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Donny wasn’t a talker, wasn’t a sharer, not even with Jonah, whom he’d known the longest. And he’d worked up until the day he died, leaving every weekday morning at seven and not returning until five thirty. He had a whole life away from here that Nora didn’t know about. Maybe he knew tons of people, but just never brought any of them to the building.

“Did there used to be a tree out there?” the man on the balcony said, interrupting her thoughts.

“Yeah,” she said automatically, her eyes going immediately out to its former spot. “We had to have it removed a couple of months after I moved in last year.”