Will was quiet, and Nora felt a sinking sense of embarrassment, of disappointment. That had been a bad volley, and now it was poetry night, all over again: this was not something he wanted to talk to her about. To bond with her about. No matter that she thought they might have this in common.

“My parents, they were kind of like yours.”

She stilled, desperate not to move, or to speak, to do anything that would break this brand-new early-morning spell.

“Not about work, but about—” He broke off, ran a hand through his hair. When he spoke again, he rushed the words out, so quick that Nora couldn’t even be sure she heard him right. “About each other.”

“Each other?”

He cleared his throat, scratched at a spot on his chest. “Yeah. They were . . . they met pretty young, when they were teenagers. They were tied up in each other, always. Obsessed with each other. They never wanted to be apart.”

Nora swallowed, a sick feeling that had nothing to do with her sinus infection settling into her stomach. Another memory from poetry night: My dad passed when I was seventeen, my mom about a year later.

“That sounds intense,” she said. She wouldn’t say—wouldn’t ask—anything else.

He didn’t speak for a long time, and all Nora could do was lie there beside him, that not-balcony space between them feeling like floors and floors of distance. What would it be like, she wondered, to close it? To scoot her body across that space and lie right next to him, and to mean to, this time? To not fall asleep on accident, but to say with her body that she could tell he’d said something painful, something honest?

“It was isolating,” he said, and then shrugged. “I had buddies from school, but then I—well, I had a lot of responsibilities at home that kept me pretty busy. I’m not even sure I ever learned how to be a good friend. And obviously, I didn’t have any . . .”

He trailed off and made a gesture toward the air around them, to the structure around them, and Nora had to swallow around the shock of sadness she felt, seeing him do that. Exactly what she’d been trying to get him to see about this place, and it was the hollowest sort of victory.

“Family,” she whispered, not even really meaning to. Once she realized she had uttered the word, she thought that would be the end of it, frankly. Mentioning his parents, that had been huge, she figured. There was no way he’d bring up—

“Donny and my mom,” he said, and Nora held her breath. Easy enough, what with the sinuses. “They’d stopped speaking, a long time before. Back when my parents first got together and then when my mom left home for good. I never met him until we came here, the once.”