When she opened them again, she could see him better, her eyes drier and her mind calmer, and she smiled softly as she saw his ridiculously messy hair, his slightly crooked glasses. She reached up and straightened them. She wanted to say, I love you, but she also didn’t, not when she felt like a throbbing, raw, exposed nerve, not when she felt like she’d be holding him hostage to her current state of emotional distress.

So instead she said, “I’m glad to see you.”

“Nora, you’ve got no idea.” He breathed in, his lashes lowering, his head tipping down and briefly shaking side to side. “You’ve got no idea how I missed you.”

“I’ve got some idea.”

“Let me say how sorry I am, about before you left. About that text message. I’ve been thinking, and—”

“Will,” she interrupted, pushing his hair back from his brow. “Let’s not talk about it here, okay? Not in a hospital.”

Will blinked, his brow furrowing, like he couldn’t imagine why a hospital wasn’t a perfectly fine place to have any sort of conversation at all, but then he nodded and said, “Right, yeah. That makes sense. You must want to see Marian and Emily, and I can go check—”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she blurted desperately, because she was, and also because she hated the way he’d looked when he’d said that—cautious and maybe even a little scared. She moved to grab his hand, to link their fingers together, to reassure him in the same way she wanted to feel reassured—not just about Jonah, but about her relationship with Will. Her future with Will.

For hours she hadn’t thought about it at all, not really; from the minute he’d called her she could only think about getting back, about Jonah and whether he would be well. She’d clung to each of Will’s updates like a lifeline, but she hadn’t thought much beyond that, hadn’t thought about how they’d left things before she’d gone—Will telling her it was too much, Will telling her he didn’t want anything serious.

But now that she was standing here with him like this, she clung to other things: the way he’d called off work, hustling to get information from and about the doctors who were treating Jonah, the way he’d stayed with her neighbors and kept calm and responsible and practical for them all. She clung to the concern etched into every line of his face, to the wrinkles in his shirt and the hospital badge clipped at the waistband of his jeans. She clung to the way he’d done all this for her and her neighbors, the way he’d taken this all so seriously. He’d been so . . . so loyal to her, and to the people she cared so much about.