He concentrated on keeping his hand steady while he waited for her to take the wreath from him, but eventually, it became clear she wouldn’t. Instead, she lifted her own crown of flowers back onto her head, smoothed the front of her summer green dress. When she met his eyes again, her own were perfectly, icily dry.

“Keep it,” she finally said.

And she didn’t smile as she moved past him.

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

After poetry night, Nora made a decision.

She didn’t need to see Will Sterling to sabotage him.

She didn’t need to see his windswept hair or his terrific spectacles or the dark, watchful eyes behind them. She didn’t need to see his smile or his frown or the little furrow he got in his brow. She definitely did not need to see the way he moved his body—strolls and leans and hands-in-his-pockets postures—and she did not need to see how quickly he could move that body when he so clearly wanted to get away from her.

No, Nora could do what she needed to do without interacting with Will Sterling at all, and she’d started by making it difficult for him to find a place to put that dumpster.

It hadn’t been any sort of challenge, not really—a few calls to neighbors in the surrounding buildings, a few requests to park in pretty specific places. The good thing about being loyal—about being neighborly!—was that you could make requests like this, and you could always count on enough people to help you out. By 6:00 a.m. on dumpster day, there was a line of cars right out front, and every spot in the back alley parking was taken. If Will had been hoping for a short back-and-forth trip to trash poor Donny’s things, he’d show up to find those hopes well and truly dashed.

Of course it’d ended up being more complicated than all that, since Will had either changed his mind or misrepresented what he’d meant by “dumpster.” What had actually shown up, in the end, was a charity service and a locally owned waste-and-recycling company, and according to Emily—truly, the ideal watchwoman, homebody that she was—the charity service had taken the lion’s share. That had definitely put a damper on Nora’s petty satisfaction over making things complicated, but also Emily and Mrs. Salas had both cried over seeing Donny’s recliner being taken away, and Marian had gone glumly, unusually quiet, so in general she still had a whole lot of anger to spare.