I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you end up keeping it the twelve months, the attorney had said, blustering and genial. Donny loved that apartment. Will was pretty sure that couldn’t be true, and that was before he’d even seen the place.

It couldn’t be true because he didn’t think Donny could love anything.

He thought of the stray cats, felt another spike of anger. What an insult.

They turned a corner down the long hallway that would lead them back to the ED, and out of habit, Will’s pace increased. The ED was like that, sort of a speed vortex, even when not all that much was going on. You got close to it, you moved faster, your attention necessarily pulled to whatever problem was right in front of you. Will had always liked that about it.

But then Dr. Abraham stopped.

So Will stopped, too. They were, obviously, still standing, so no eye contact allowed. They both simply stared at those double doors, like they were preparing to storm a castle.

“My ex-wife,” Abraham began, and Will almost, almost laughed. Another relative, Jesus. This was an extremely unre-latable area for Will personally.

“She owns three apartments in this city.”

Will raised his eyebrows. Must be nice. Up until a few days ago, he owned exactly zero apartments, and hadn’t planned to until he’d paid off some more of his truly astronomical student loan debt. Before he’d learned about this twelve-month condition, the best thing he could say about inheriting Donny’s apartment was that selling it would at least help him put a sizable dent in his monthly bill from the federal government. It still would, he guessed, but not soon enough.

“Short-term rentals, all of them. She’s quite successful.”

Will looked over then, something about Abraham’s tone less pedantic than usual. The man was smoothing the lapel of his white coat, and for one second—not even one second, probably not even half a second—he looked entirely unsure of himself.

Odd, that, Will thought, Abraham-echoing. He took another sip of coffee, wondered if Janine had accidentally given him decaf.

“That’s—” he began, once he’d swallowed, but it was clear this was the kind of conversation where he was not supposed to participate with actual replies, because Abraham talked over him.

“She uses a website. It seems that once one gets the units up and running, they rather pay for themselves. And they must require very little intervention. She travels a lot.”

There was that lapel-smoothing again. Abraham was the only doctor in the ED who even wore the white coat with any regularity, which up until this minute Will had always chalked up to the man’s pathological insistence on something he called “professional rectitude.” But clearly there was also a lapel-smoothing pathology happening, too.