Beside her, Will laughed again, a soft, knowing sound. Probably he was thinking of all the kitten visits she didn’t get to come over for.

“Always,” he said, a trace of indulgent sarcasm in his voice.

She smiled over at him. “I think maybe my body knew this was an okay place to be sick? A safe place. My parents, they weren’t really . . . nurturers. They didn’t have time for that.”

She paused, caught herself tugging on the ends of her hair, an old habit that had been, in her younger years, a constant source of frustration to her mother, and also the reason for the infamous Ringo haircut she’d had for her first summer here. But she was probably being unfair to her parents. They still called her, still checked on her. They’d made sure she’d had what she needed, growing up. They were smart and interesting and worldly. They told her they loved her all the time, and she believed them.

But . . . they hadn’t been like Nonna. They had never been like Nonna. They had never taught her about the things they loved; they had never cooked with her or stayed up late to do old jigsaw puzzles with her or planted pots of vegetables with her. They had never asked her what she was reading or told her about what they were reading; they had never regaled her with long, winding stories about their lives, full of the names of people she’d never met and never would.

She shut her eyes against a wave of golden hour grief, the kind that had kept her company all through the winter.

“That’s probably not how sickness works, I know,” she added, when she felt like she could speak again.

The mattress shifted as he moved, lifting the leg he’d had on the floor up to stretch beside the one on the bed. “I only ever got sick during my residency when I had a run of days off, it seemed like. The body does all kinds of things, in response to stress.”

“Oh,” she rushed out, embarrassed by the comparison. “I don’t want to act like it was stressful, with my parents.”

It was, though. It was stressful to spend so much time alone. It was stressful that it wasn’t easy to make friends, that most of her socialization came from people who were way older than her. It was stressful to feel small and inconvenient, to feel like you spent nine months of your year looking forward to three, to come back at the end of them and feel like you had to get used to life all over again. It was still stressful, all these years later.