Everyone fell quiet again, this silence more about sadness than shock, and Nora felt a surge of protectiveness for her assembled neighbors, for Nonna, for Donny. If Will Sterling had bothered to stick around the other morning (I’ll see you, he’d said!), this is what she would’ve gotten around to telling him. This is what she loved about it here—people who weren’t technically family taking care of one another like they were.

She sensed something in the room changing, everyone looking up to where she stood, as though all of a sudden, they’d decided Mrs. Salas’s question wasn’t really rhetorical at all. Well, what did it matter how? The fact of the matter was, no matter the how of Will Sterling’s betrayal, Nora owed it to Nonna and to her neighbors to try her best to stop this rental-property plan. After all, no one here had even batted an eye at the end, when Nonna had said she wanted Nora to take over for her. No one had questioned it, because they’d always trusted Nonna, and they’d always, always believed in Nora.

She straightened, letting that belief bolster her.

She would absolutely fix this. She had to.

“He won’t do this to Donny,” she said firmly. “I won’t let him.”

But that’s when she realized that no one, in fact, had been looking up at her at all.

“Hello,” said a voice from behind her.

She recognized it right away.

It was a different sort of Hello, this one, not the soft, tentative inquisition that he’d spoken from his—no, Donny’s; on principle, she would keep thinking of it as Donny’s—balcony. This Hello was full-throated, confident, and even without turning she could tell that the person who’d said it was smiling. Or maybe smirking. It was the kind of Hello that told her he’d been standing. right. there. for the exact moment she’d made an extremely confident promise about his future prospects in this building.

It was the kind of Hello that made her dread turning around.

For a half second of stunned embarrassment she assumed the previous plant-dropping posture: statue-still and squeezed-shut eyes, a breath caught in her throat. It was so like that morning from a few days ago that she had to drag her attention to the details that made it different: the dusty smell of the laundry room, the letter in her hand, Benny’s late but pointed throat-clearing, and also the fact that she was wearing a full set of clothing.

She opened her eyes, and turned to face him.

And—well.

Well!