For a second, he raised his hand to his face, as though to push up his own, but then he remembered he hadn’t worn them.

Which was a choice that had nothing to do with Nora.

Honestly, the look Marian Goodnight was giving him was pretty intimidating, but it was at least less confusing than the meal delivery. Clearly there was a good cop/bad cop situation playing out here, so he relaxed his shoulders, tucked his hands into his pockets, and prepared for battle.

“I know someone,” he said, smiling.

Marian narrowed her eyes. “Well, that’s Chicago for you, isn’t it? Who’d you have to murder?”

He blinked. “What? No one.”

She looked him up and down, her lip curling. “It’d be easy for you, probably. You and all your . . . medicines.”

Man! This lady was mean. He sort of liked it.

“I have not murdered anyone.”

She sniffed. “We’ll see.”

He pressed his lips together, though he wasn’t sure why being accused of a felony made him want to laugh for the first time today. Either way, whatever Mrs. Salas had meant about the bathroom faucet was information that was not going to be forthcoming, because Mrs. Goodnight went back to completely ignoring him, opening Donny’s fridge and refilling shelves that Will had only finished cleaning out a half hour ago.

Within minutes it was perfume and chat again, Mrs. Salas back with a tin of what she told him were mantecaditos, the lid already off when she’d walked back through the door. “Have one,” she’d said, practically shoving a cookie into his face, and he wondered if maybe he was about to get murdered.

But as he chewed it—crisp and buttery, and not a bad way to go, if it came to it—he started to realize something else was afoot.

Mrs. Salas didn’t just have ten thousand pounds of food; she also had ten thousand questions and ten thousand topics of conversation. She had to know what kind of doctor he was and what hospital he worked at and whether he’d ever watched a show about a dermatologist who pops pimples all day. She had to show him the leaky bathroom faucet, the one Donny had reported at the last building meeting he’d been to, and the one that Will would need to reschedule the plumber for. She had to tell him about the tiny storage door in the front bedroom closet, in case he hadn’t found it himself yet. She had to ask if he’d found a pair of red-handled scissors she’d let Donny borrow last month, or if he’d want a box of Donny’s mail she’d been keeping.

No, this wasn’t murder.

This was something more . . . complicated.

This was filling up Donny’s apartment with things, when he’d come to clean it out.