He stilled in place. When he turned around, he seemed to look past her, toward the building, toward its balconies. She wondered if he could see her neighbors there, watching them both. That smile—no, smirk—played again on his mouth, and she thought (she couldn’t believe she thought!) that she’d like to kiss that expression right off his face.

“It’s a good thing, then,” he called back, his voice carrying across the yard. “It’s a good thing I’m not used to easy.”

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

It was easier, frankly, to think of her as an enemy.

Will had a lot of experience with enemies. Not people, not exactly, though he guessed if he thought about it hard enough, the man in whose apartment he was standing would probably qualify. No, Will’s enemies had always been bigger, more . . . institutional. School systems, government programs, billing departments, that sort of thing. Becoming a doctor meant that he’d managed to keep these deep-seated blood feuds from his adolescence alive into his adulthood, though he supposed he had a more experienced perspective now. Still, when he’d been younger, full of fear and sadness and anger, having adversaries had helped him focus, helped him survive. Nothing was complicated when you had an enemy. It was you versus them, and you versus them stopped you thinking about the other problem, which was usually something more like: you versus you.

You versus your fear. You versus your sadness. You versus your anger.

So with Nora—the girl on the balcony after all, it seemed—it would have to be him versus her, and not him versus his memory of her. Not him versus his attraction to her. Not him versus his boyish, reckless feelings for her.

In the two days since he’d walked away from her, he’d worked on it, this perspective. Instead of thinking about the way she’d looked up close—that long ponytail and those light blue eyes—he’d gone to big-box hardware stores, buying paint and trays and rollers. Instead of thinking about what she’d said—about protecting Donny, about this godforsaken pile of bricks being some kind of “family”—he researched haul-away companies and mattress deliveries and cleaning services. Instead of thinking about how he’d felt in that basement—unsure, unbalanced, unwanted—he’d scrolled through pages of similar-sized rentals in the neighborhood, drafting three different versions of the unit description he’d post when the time came. He got invested.

And getting invested made it possible to think of her and her neighbors as an institution all on their own. An easy enemy, then. Nothing personal about it.

When he’d arrived back at the building this morning, he’d prepared himself for confrontation, half expecting that there’d be some kind of notice taped on Donny’s door. A cease-and-desist, maybe, or at least a hastily scrawled “KEEP OUT” sign. But nothing greeted him, not even the flick of curtains in the front windows as he’d walked up, a stack of flattened boxes tucked under his arm. In the hall, even the cherub sconces seemed indifferent, not that it was healthy for him to imagine otherwise. And now, inside Donny’s apartment, the silence was deafening—he couldn’t even hear footsteps in the unit above him.