She nodded and took a nervous breath, indicating to him that she’d follow his lead. She could’ve made her own way, certainly—every apartment in the building was the same, with bedrooms toward the front of the building and the living areas toward the rear, all of the rooms stacked up single file in the long, narrow arrangement of countless other Chicago apartments. But letting Will go ahead of her at least allowed her the opportunity to openly gawk at the changes without his notice. Even the hallway seemed brighter, and when she tipped her head back to see that two modern-looking light fixtures had been installed, she felt . . . well! She felt almost envious.

But then, she smelled it.

“Oh,” she said, stopping past the first bedroom, right before the apartment’s bathroom door. It wasn’t quite so bad as Will had made it sound, but it sure wasn’t great, either. “I got it now.”

“Yeah. So far as I can tell, nothing in the bathroom, though. No leaks, nothing in the cabinets.”

She edged forward and peeked in, found it as gleaming as the kitchen—nothing on the countertop other than a full bottle of hand soap, a crisp white curtain hanging bright and smooth across the shower. There were fluffy white hand towels to match, hung from a shiny chrome rod on the wall. Hey, she didn’t have one of those! She had to use this annoying freestanding thing that took up extra space on her countertop and made it hard for her to blow-dry her hair without the cord getting caught. Twice she’d almost broken a toe because of it falling down. Also, had he put a new faucet in? That one looked nice, more functional than her—

“I think it’s coming from in here,” he said.

He gestured toward the apartment’s biggest bedroom, the one at the very front of the building with the large picture window. It was the copy of the room she’d been in inside her own apartment—the room that had once been Nonna’s. Seeing Will’s version of it—nothing much more than a (gulp) crisply made bed and a couple of nightstands—was a reminder of how big it really was when it wasn’t crowded with the furniture of Nonna’s that Nora had stubbornly kept even as she’d tried to fit in the things she needed to make her own life here work.

Thankfully, there was no time to dwell on that, not with the reason for her visit becoming immediately more pungent. It still wasn’t quite as bad as she’d been imagining—it reminded her a little of the way the basement had smelled in the shared house she’d lived in for her last year of college—but it certainly wasn’t the kind of odor anyone would want hanging around or spreading.

“You already checked under the furniture?” she asked.