Since not-really-a-dumpster day, Nora’s efforts had been mostly email-based, and she was working on an idea that she thought was somewhere between poetry night and Deepa’s dead-fish plot. So far, doing the outreach had meant some disruption to her daily schedule, and she was feeling more than a little guilty about how distracted she’d been during the hours she was supposed to be working on the continuing-to-be-a-nightmare eco-influencer site. But every once in a while, passing by a window or heading out to run an errand for herself or one of her neighbors, she’d get a glimpse of Will Sterling’s car. He was here and he was taking apart Donny’s apartment, and that meant she was running out of time.

It also meant, she thought, that the last few days had been an exercise in mutual avoidance.

From her cramped desk space, she resisted the urge to stand, to peer out the front window to look for some sign of him. The fact that she even had such an urge was the whole problem, frankly. It seemed like every time she saw Will Sterling, she forgot herself. Not for the first time since poetry night, her stomach fluttered with the memory of their conversation downstairs—how he watched her, how he listened to her.

How he turned away from her, when she got too close.

They weren’t all that with me when they were alive.

He hadn’t meant to say it; that much had been clear in the seconds after she’d turned to face him. And it wasn’t only that he’d bolted, with his sloppy dumpster-based exit strategy. It was the way he’d looked at her before he’d gone—some combination of anger and betrayal and confusion. Like she’d tricked him somehow, when he’d been the one to follow her in the first place.

The only comfort in that, she figured, was that at least he seemed to forget himself, too, every time they talked. When they were in each other’s orbit, nothing ever seemed to go to plan. After all, she hadn’t meant to say anything to him about Nonna, or about Mary Oliver, or about how she’d souped up poetry night for him. But one look from Will—one simple, soft use of her name—and it’d been the golden hour all over again.

That feeling that she could’ve talked and talked.

And that she could’ve listened and listened.