She narrowed her eyes. “Whatever, yes! Twenty years, though I don’t see why it matters so much to you. In any case, I know everything you don’t about this place, and I’m telling you, you’ll be causing a lot of difficulty for the people who live here.”

“But you don’t.”

She blinked. “I don’t what?”

“You don’t know everything. For example, you clearly didn’t know that it’s not on the prohibited-buildings list for short-term rentals.”

Okay, that was at least two points to him, if she wanted to update Marian on the score later. He was right; that was the worst of it. He was completely right.

But still. Still, twenty years! She had to remember that she knew lots of things he didn’t.

And she intended to use them.

“I know you said you didn’t know your uncle well,” she said, and almost immediately the look in his eyes changed—all that confidence gone with a blink, replaced at first with something cautious and vulnerable, and then, when she finished her sentence, something determined and hard.

“But I did. And he wouldn’t have wanted this. He really loved that apartment.”

He stared at her. Nothing like the starlit gaze from the other morning.

Nothing like that at all.

“I’ve heard,” he said flatly.

“It’s only that,” she said, not really minding the note of pleading in her voice, “we’re a family.”

For a second, she thought it might’ve worked. He dropped his eyes to the grass and shifted his feet. She thought he might’ve even nodded his head.

But if he did, it wasn’t in agreement.

“Well, Nora,” he said (she did! not! like it!), raising his glasses-free, sympathy-free eyes to hers. “I’m not really a member of your family. So.”

So?

That so—it sounded to Nora like a declaration. Whatever soft conversation they’d started with on their balconies, there was no going back to that. They were on different sides now.

Around them, the backyard seemed unusually still, unusually quiet, and she had the sense that they were being watched—that everyone had gone back to their apartments, pressing their curious, concerned faces against their back doors to see how Nora would handle this.

So, she thought, making it a declaration of her own. She would not break first. She would stand here where it felt like the air got thinner and thinner between them, where it felt like her body buzzed with strange, stifling confusion: a cocktail of anger and attraction, disappointment and excitement.

She would not break first.

When his phone beeped again, she held herself still. But when he moved to pull it from his pocket, looking at the screen, she let herself breathe a sigh of relief. A win by default was still a win.