“I believe you. I’m saying, how?”

This was really taxing Will’s man brain. She took a sidelong glance at him and he was staring into the middle distance like he’d gotten punched in the face by those kittens.

“My guess is, they came in through the back door you seem to be leaving open while you work.” She didn’t want to talk about her additional guess, which was that they had probably been led there by one of the strays who’d come looking for Donny’s regular handouts.

He turned to look at her, blinking. He didn’t have his glasses on but it didn’t really matter, not when he was up close like this. She thought he might’ve been the most attractive man she’d ever sat next to. Along the strong, stubbled line of his jaw, he had a hair-thin pink scratch from where one of the kittens had caught him during hamper transport. That was a version of getting punched in the face, she supposed.

And because she was still in the habit of forgetting herself, it took everything she had in her not to reach up and touch it.

“Right,” he said, but honestly he still seemed a little dazed. Was he . . . looking at her mouth? Or did she also have kitten scratches somewhere on her face? “That’s probably it.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Keep the door shut, I guess,” he said automatically, and this time, she didn’t bother stifling her laughter. It came out in a surprised burst, the moment—the entire situation—so ludicrous and unexpected, and Will’s answer so bland and matter-of-fact and unsuited to the moment. She laughed so hard she had to tip her head back against the wall behind them; she had to reach up to wipe tears from the corners of her eyes. She laughed so hard that she had to sigh when she was done, to catch her breath, and the best part was, Will laughed along with her—a quieter, more constrained version of her own, but enough that it made the ends of his messy hair tremble.

When they’d finished—when they both seemed to remember that laughing wasn’t really something they did together—an awkward silence fell, the muffled sounds of ringing phones and barking dogs coming from the lobby outside their treatment room. Nora shifted on the bench, trying not to notice the way their thighs had come to press against each other during their shared outburst.

“I meant about the kittens,” she finally said, because now, after the laughter, the quiet between them was killing her.

“Oh. Well. I—I don’t know. I can’t keep them.”

She looked over at him, saw that his face had gone all serious again.

“Cats are very self-sufficient. Probably great pets for a workaholic doctor to have.”