It was a good idea, a short-term rental. He’d stayed in a few during his fourth year of med school, four weeks at a time at various programs where he’d done his acting internships. But those places had been bland and sterile, the furniture inside neutral and inoffensive, the hallways outside entirely absent of dangly chandeliers and cherubic sconces and textured wallpaper.

He thought of the woman on the balcony again, felt that stubborn hiccup in his heart.

“I’ll call her for you,” Abraham said.

Will blinked. “Wait, who?”

Abraham broke the no eye-contact rule to look over and up at him, his expression annoyed. “My ex-wife,” he snapped.

“Right,” Will said, the back of his neck heating. “My apologies.”

My apologies, Christ. He pushed up his glasses. It was a good idea, the short-term rental. Maybe exactly the right idea. It was absolutely more productive than insomnia, or than thinking compulsively about ten minutes of conversation with a woman who’d made him feel like a teenager.

“It couldn’t hurt to take a phone call,” Abraham said. He was using his full-on “professional rectitude” voice, which meant Will was taking too long to answer.

“No,” he said finally. “It couldn’t.”

A phone call was the least of it.

At the end of his shift, Will was back in the cafeteria, sitting across from a small, brightly clothed woman who’d introduced herself as “Sally no-longer-Abraham” and who preferred hugs to handshakes as a form of greeting. She was a day and a half away from a two-week Caribbean vacation, and despite Will’s insistence in their initial phone call—during which Dr. Abraham had stayed unnervingly close—that there was nothing urgent about his situation, she’d insisted on an in-person meeting.

“Time is money!” she’d said, assuring Will that she loved nothing more than “talking about the biz.”

And based on the way this meeting had gone so far, that was . . . absolutely true.

She had not stopped.

Sally’s three units were all in Wicker Park: a basement apartment on North Elk Grove, quiet but close to a bunch of shops on Milwaukee; one on West Le Moyne; a “problem child” for its window AC and its unreliable building elevator; and finally, her prized showpiece, a loft on Western Avenue with free parking and a per-night price that soared in the summertime. She had pictures of each one on her tablet, queued up on the rental website she used and ready for Will’s inspection, and as he swiped through, she provided commentary that could only be described as thorough. Will now knew where she’d gotten every carefully chosen area rug; he also now knew, incidentally, about the incredibly detailed thought processes Sally had for placement of said area rugs. He might not have needed to know about the area rug placement, but he appreciated it, all the detail. Already he felt invested in this idea, focused on it.