“Like the feeling I had tonight. Like Nonna was with me. Do you ever feel like that, about your parents?”

“Not really. They weren’t all that with me when they were alive.”

As soon as it was out of his mouth—loose, thoughtless, immediate—he regretted it. He clamped his mouth shut and ground his teeth together. He did not do this. He did not talk about his parents to anyone, not beyond the barest, shallowest facts. What they did for a living, when they’d died. Anything more ended up reflecting poorly on them, and probably on him, too. And now, to Nora—to a woman who, by virtue of her association with Donny, was already too close for comfort when it came to his messy family history—he’d made his mom and dad sound selfish or negligent or something worse. He’d made himself sound grudging, resentful, petty.

Childish.

Why hadn’t he said something blandly comforting, something vaguely commiserating? He did it all the time at work. He had all kinds of canned answers, stacked up inside him like they were on pantry shelves.

But with Nora, it seemed like he could never quite reach for one when he needed to. With Nora, it seemed like he didn’t have those answers at all.

She turned her shoulders again so she faced him, that look of gentle invitation in her eyes, and that’s when he realized that she hadn’t really agreed to the subject change after all. She’d simply found another way in. Part of him admired her for it, same as the way he admired her for this poetry reading, no matter that it was making his life damned inconvenient. It was sly and soft and strangely disarming.

But another part of him wanted far, far away from it.

Away from her, and the things she made him feel, and what those feelings made him fear.

He should’ve never followed her in here.

“Do you—” she began, but he cut her off.

“I should go,” he said, maybe a bit more sharply than he intended. “I have a dumpster being delivered tomorrow.”

She blinked. “A . . . dumpster?”

He reached up, pulled the laurel wreath off his head. “Getting rid of some things,” he said. Most everything, he thought.

This feeling, he thought.

He held out the laurel wreath to her, and she looked down at it, then back up at him. This look, it was worse than any of the smiles he’d seen on her face tonight. It was part confusion, part embarrassment, and all disappointment. He almost wished he didn’t have his glasses on.