Nora dropped her hands, sobering. “I’m in love with him. And he’s—I don’t know. He’s not sure about being serious with someone. That’s what he said, before.”

Marian clicked her tongue. “A person doesn’t do the things Will did over the last couple of days unless they’re serious, Nora.”

Nora nodded again, because of course part of her believed that, too. It’s what she’d clung to last night in the hospital, her desperation to believe that they’d settled things, even without words between them. But thinking of it now, thinking of Will’s determined, practical helpfulness, a little clumsier than usual, this morning—she wondered if they had both, in a way, still been hiding. Jonah’s accident like a towel rod or a sink faucet or a new can of paint. Some way for them to keep from having to risk themselves.

She thought about Will that day in Donny’s apartment—that photograph, that look in his eyes when he told her it was too much between them. She wouldn’t break her promise to him, wouldn’t tell Marian what she knew about his parents and what their relationship had done to him. But she couldn’t set it aside in her own mind, either.

She knew Will would forgive her for this morning if she said she was sorry for sending him away, for not talking to him the way she should have.

But would he forgive her for telling him how she really felt about him?

Or was it still too much?

Would it always be?

“But, Nora,” Marian said, cutting through her thoughts, her voice gentler this time. “What are you doing, looking for a sure thing?”

Nora looked over at Marian, and for the first time in her life, she didn’t even try to answer one of her neighbor’s questions. She simply begged with her eyes to have this one answered for her.

“Not every love you have is the kind like you had with your nonna. Or like the kind you have with me or Emily, or Jonah. Or anyone in this whole place, with the exception of that new man downstairs, I guess. Love can’t always be a sure thing from the start.”

She thought about that dark morning she’d first talked to Will—that electric, new feeling she’d had, that curiosity and intensity that had carried over even into their silly feuds about the apartment. She thought about his laugh and his way of making conversation with almost anyone; she thought about the secret, tender heart that hid behind his practicality, and she thought about how he pushed her, so gently, in the directions she always wanted to go herself. She thought about the way she wanted him, the way she could be a certain version of herself with him, someone different from who she was with anyone else in her life, ever.