Alone with Nora, the immediate crisis mitigated, he wondered if it would turn awkward between them—things they hadn’t said, but things they’d agreed not to talk about here. But for Will, at least, it was the opposite of awkward. It came so easy to him this way—to get her tea, to help her wrangle things out of her messily packed suitcase so she could go wash her face, to answer every medical question she had about Jonah, who hadn’t been brought to a room until after midnight, to arrange his body so she could rest comfortably against him. It all felt so practical, so responsible. So safe.

He recognized her energy from many days and nights he’d spent checking in on families—tired but teed-up, relieved but worried. With her head on his thigh and her legs draped over the arm of the tiny love seat, she told him all kinds of things he didn’t know, origin stories for how everyone had ended up in the building. Jonah had grown up nearby, the only child of parents who’d run a small grocery store less than five blocks away; he’d moved in after he married a woman who’d eventually left him (and the apartment) after only three months to move to Maine with a man Jonah worked with. Mr. and Mrs. Salas had moved in after they’d sold their place in Bucktown, only ever intending to stay for a few years but eventually making peace with the fact that their son would be staying for good in Singapore, the place where he’d gotten a job in finance after college. Benny’s aunt Alma had lived in the building, and because he’d been her favorite, because he’d stayed with her for long periods when his own mother was ill, he’d taken over the lease way back when Alma had moved into a rest home. Marian and Emily—both from small, somewhat challenging families—had come to the building only two years after they’d graduated from college, the place where they’d met and fallen in love.

Nora’s grandmother, for her part, had moved in as a widow, surprising Nora’s mother—her only child—by selling her paid-off house in the suburbs and moving into an apartment that she’d always said had something special about it.

“Those little angels in the hallway,” Nora said, her feet swinging gently back and forth, “I think that’s what sold her. She loved things like that.”

Nora thought Nonna had needed a new start, had needed to make a home only for herself after so many years of focusing on making her husband comfortable. “And with my mom so far away, she needed a new family, too, I think,” Nora had said.