Will didn’t miss that she’d skipped over whatever she might’ve known about Donny and his history with the building, a kindness that made him love her all the more. Instead, she went right on ahead to the year her grandmother had led the effort to take the building condo, to all the moments where various building traditions were born. Will listened and stroked his fingers idly through her hair, recognizing this for what it was: not only Nora winding herself down but also Nora giving him her full trust, giving him the history of the building that had been the source of their feud. As she spoke, her voice got lower and slower, her eyes closing longer and longer on each blink.

Orphans, kind of, he thought, thinking through the stories she’d told him—grown-ups upended for one reason or another, making their own family unit even amid weird wallpaper and awful wall sconces. For the first time since he got the call from Donny’s lawyer, he let himself imagine that his uncle had left him the apartment not as some kind of cross-generational slap in the face but instead as some kind of offering. Some kind of apology, or gesture of understanding. From one orphan to another, maybe. A belated gift Donny—for whatever angry, grudging reason—hadn’t been able to give Will sixteen years ago.

He felt strangely, surprisingly grateful to his uncle.

Against his leg, Nora’s head felt heavier, her body earnestly sinking into sleep now. “Not gonna drool this time,” she murmured. “Because I’m not sick.”

“You can if you want,” he told her, which he wasn’t sure made sense, but it’d been a long day for him, too. He leaned his head back against the wall behind him, grateful that the lights above had dimmed automatically, grateful that he’d slept in far more uncomfortable places, grateful that Nora was home and that he was with her, that he’d gotten to help her. He thought sleepily of that scroll of poetry at home, the one he’d left on his nightstand. Little fragments of it caught at the edges of his brain: lily’s white, deep vermilion in the rose. Figures of delight.

You, pattern of all those.

He’d have to remember to tell Nora about it, this sentimental start he’d made while she was away. But for now—Jonah’s accident aside—this all seemed just as well: the best of who he was, all in service to her.

This is how I’ll be with her, he told himself as he drifted off, as sure as if he’d settled on a treatment. This isn’t selfish at all.

He might’ve known it wouldn’t be so easy.