“Eleanora DeAngelo Clarke,” Sally said, before Will could finish.
His heart hiccupped; his hands twitched. He would not do the chest-rubbing thing.
That was a beautiful name, though. Eleanora.
Sally barreled right on, which was for the best. What did her name matter, after all?
“I mean, I’m assuming. The other third-floor resident is a guy called Jonah. Eleanora, she’s probably the one.”
Goddamn these hiccups. Medicine had really never found a cure for them, not that his were the typical kind.
“Anyway,” Sally said, “Gerald told me—grudgingly, if I’m being honest, but you know how he is—that everyone here thinks you’re real charming. You gotta translate some of that famous bedside manner into this job! Some smiles and reassurances while you clean up the place, and you could have this whole thing sewn up quick.”
Will cleared his throat, straightened in his chair. Right. Two weeks, basically. He could do that. And he was charming! Witness his coffee jokes, or the way he always got called in for crying kids. Or crying adults, frankly. He could do this. Get some goodwill, get the apartment into shape, get money, get Donny out of his head. The woman on the balcony had nothing to do with it.
He just had to stay focused.
Sally snapped the tablet shut, smiled across the table at him as though they’d shaken hands on a deal. “If I were you,” she said cheerfully, “I’d start with Eleanora.”
Chapter 3
“He called you Ms. Clarke!”
Nora pursed her lips and prayed for strength as murmurs of disapproval spread through the assembled group. This building meeting was really, really not going well.
That made two in a row, not that Nora was counting, and since the last one had been what basically amounted to a collectively devastated debrief over Donny’s death, that was really saying something. But this morning—called together hastily once again—Nora’s neighbors seemed almost as shocked, almost as shaken as they were during that last meeting. Their regular business—maintenance reports, budget updates, event calendars—all of it shunted to some other day.
All because of the man on the balcony, and his awful letter.
His letter!
“Marian,” Nora said, trying to keep the exclamations that were in her head out of her voice. “Why don’t you let me have that back for now?”
“Ms.!” Marian repeated, drawing it out, fully exclamated— Mizzzzzzz!—obviously not ready to let Nora have the letter back. She was staring down at it through the lenses of her glasses like she could make it catch fire with her eyes. “I give him points for making no assumptions about you, Nora, but this whole thing doesn’t seem very neighborly!”
“Right,” Nora said, reaching a hand out from her spot by the washing machines. “If I could—”
“Strangers,” Emily said quietly, shaking her head. “Staying here.”
“Don’t see as how it’ll work,” said Jonah, his arms crossed over his skinny chest. “People coming in and out like that. What is it, like a hotel?”
“Yep,” said Benny, also arms crossed. He and Jonah always sat together, the younger, quieter Benny having long ago developed an abiding admiration for eighty-year-old Jonah’s extremely loud pronouncements.
“A hotel!” Emily gasped, and Marian reached over, gently patting her wife’s hand. At present, however, her attention was divided between comfort and outrage, because she was still looking down at the letter.
“He’s already filed for the registration!” she cried, affronted, and Nora definitely knew the feeling.
The man from the other morning wasn’t loyal, after all.
In the days after she’d first met him, Nora had spent her golden hours back out on her balcony, listening for some sound of him below. At first she’d convinced herself that she’d only been waiting for an opportunity to finish their conversation, to tell him all the reasons he would surely come to love the building as much as she did. But the truth was, in the shadowy quiet of the predawn, she’d been waiting for something else—a chance to see his soft smile, to hear his golden-hour whisper.
She’d thought for sure he’d come back.
But he hadn’t.
He’d sent a letter.
She stepped forward, propelled by a fresh feeling of betrayal, pulling the letter from Marian’s fingers and hoping that it’d lost some of its power since she’d first opened it last night. She’d stood at the kitchen counter, a red-alarm fire in her brain, realizing that while she’d been lapsing into some kind of balcony-induced, clearly-not-meeting-enough-men-her-age hypnosis, the guy who had charmed her so completely had been making plans: the registration with the city, sure, but also a set of what he’d described in his letter as “modest upgrades” that would be “minimally disruptive” to other “tenants” (tenants! Nora’s head had almost blown off). He planned to start on Monday. He planned to take no longer than two weeks. He planned to have his “unit” (unit! Enraging) ready for short-term renters by the beginning of June.
So far, all she’d planned was this emergency meeting.
She cleared her throat. “I’ve printed out some fact sheets from the website he’s planning to use,” she announced, reaching for the small stack of papers on top of the washing machine. It was not the most edifying thing, using a washing machine as a podium, but needs must, for this emergency. “As you’ll see, their minimum rental term is three days; the maximum is six weeks.”
At that, Nora caught sight of Emily’s small face paling as she clutched her newly acquired fact sheet. Emily had always been sensitive, prone to worrying, but a mild heart attack a couple of years ago—one that had prompted an earlier-than-planned retirement—had dialed it all up, and that was even before Nonna and Donny. Nora left her desk two days a week at lunch to go down and eat with Emily, folding into a rotation she shared with Mr. and Mrs. Salas. She was pretty sure Emily ought to be talking to a therapist, but so far, Nora’s gentle suggestions had been met with sharp resistance.
“Three days is bad news,” said Mr. Salas. “That’s weekenders. People who’ll come in and make a mess and leave, and I doubt this guy is going to run his place like a nice hotel.”
Emily shuddered, and Nora cringed inwardly at Mr. Salas making things worse, but he wasn’t wrong. Nora had seen the return address on that envelope. Will Sterling (another betrayal: his last name wasn’t even Pasternak! Instead, he had a name like a doctor on General Hospital, which Nora found extremely insulting) lived far south enough that coming up to this part of the city regularly would be a massive hassle, particularly given what he’d said about the way he worked. So he’d either neglect it or hire people to maintain it, which would mean more traffic in and out, more disruption.
Disruption was not the business of this building. Or at least it hadn’t been, not until lately.
“Can we stop this, Nora?” asked Mrs. Salas. “Do something about the bylaws?”
Nora swallowed, feeling shamed. If she’d been better about all this, she would’ve studied the bylaws right after Nonna had died. She would have paid more attention to the fact that they basically hadn’t been updated since the year Nonna had led the effort to take the building condo. She would’ve done whatever cleanup and updates were necessary while Donny was still alive, to make sure she prevented anything like this from happening.
But she hadn’t been better, at least not about this. She’d been figuring out her move and her work; she’d been dealing with paperwork from Nonna’s estate; she’d been grieving.
She cleared her throat. “We can’t, not really. When you all went in on this together, you made sure every decision about the building had to be made unanimously.”
Nora had always loved this part of the building’s story—a commitment they’d made to each other all these years ago, a seal on this found family they’d made together. Now, though—with Will Sterling out there, making plans—Nora had to admit that it was, as Nonna might have put it, very inconvenient!
/>
“And so now we’d need Donny’s nephew,” said Mrs. Salas, shaking her head.
For a few seconds, the room was quiet, and Nora’s heart clenched. They’d all been so shocked to find it out—all this time, Donny had someone, and he’d never said a word. That, she knew, felt like a betrayal all its own.
“Terrible of him to do this,” said Jonah, his voice rough, and it wasn’t until he spoke again that she realized he wasn’t making the accusation against his longtime friend. “Turning that place into a hotel room.”
Emily sniffled, and Marian patted her hand again.
Mrs. Salas said, “How could he do this to Donny?”
Everyone fell quiet again, this silence more about sadness than shock, and Nora felt a surge of protectiveness for her assembled neighbors, for Nonna, for Donny. If Will Sterling had bothered to stick around the other morning (I’ll see you, he’d said!), this is what she would’ve gotten around to telling him. This is what she loved about it here—people who weren’t technically family taking care of one another like they were.
She sensed something in the room changing, everyone looking up to where she stood, as though all of a sudden, they’d decided Mrs. Salas’s question wasn’t really rhetorical at all. Well, what did it matter how? The fact of the matter was, no matter the how of Will Sterling’s betrayal, Nora owed it to Nonna and to her neighbors to try her best to stop this rental-property plan. After all, no one here had even batted an eye at the end, when Nonna had said she wanted Nora to take over for her. No one had questioned it, because they’d always trusted Nonna, and they’d always, always believed in Nora.
She straightened, letting that belief bolster her.
She would absolutely fix this. She had to.
“He won’t do this to Donny,” she said firmly. “I won’t let him.”
But that’s when she realized that no one, in fact, had been looking up at her at all.
“Hello,” said a voice from behind her.
She recognized it right away.
It was a different sort of Hello, this one, not the soft, tentative inquisition that he’d spoken from his—no, Donny’s; on principle, she would keep thinking of it as Donny’s—balcony. This Hello was full-throated, confident, and even without turning she could tell that the person who’d said it was smiling. Or maybe smirking. It was the kind of Hello that told her he’d been standing. right. there. for the exact moment she’d made an extremely confident promise about his future prospects in this building.
It was the kind of Hello that made her dread turning around.
For a half second of stunned embarrassment she assumed the previous plant-dropping posture: statue-still and squeezed-shut eyes, a breath caught in her throat. It was so like that morning from a few days ago that she had to drag her attention to the details that made it different: the dusty smell of the laundry room, the letter in her hand, Benny’s late but pointed throat-clearing, and also the fact that she was wearing a full set of clothing.
She opened her eyes, and turned to face him.
And—well.
Well!
Taller and leaner than she’d thought initially, her perspective obviously distorted during her first high-above sight of him. Straight on like this, he seemed to take up the whole doorway, the definition of his chest more apparent in the long-sleeved T-shirt he wore, sleeves pushed up, and neither of his hands lifting to his not-startled heart. Instead, they stayed tucked into the front pockets of his loose, faded jeans, everything about his body as casual and comfortable as could be.
She decided that he was, in fact, smirking, a smirk to match his stance, and also a smirk that went obnoxiously nicely with his still very attractive face: wind-machine hair, thick and deep brown to complement dark eyebrows and lashes that would probably cost her at least a hundred and fifty bucks at Sephora, because there was no justice for women in this world. Maybe she would’ve noticed the color of his eyes, but the fact was, she was too preoccupied by the final betrayal in this balcony-to-basement transformation:
He wasn’t wearing his glasses.
She’d really liked those glasses.
“You,” she said without thinking, her face heating immediately at the way it sounded to her own ears: a monosyllable that didn’t so much express her disdain as it did her sense of injury, of heart-piercing disappointment. The letter in her hands felt heavy, outsized.
He didn’t respond, other than a slight falter to his smirk, and before she could think of anything else to say, he was moving past her, his arm outstretched, his expression transforming into a full, disarming, totally charming smile, and she almost groaned when she realized he’d known exactly where to aim it for maximum tension-diffusing effect.
“Hi,” he said to Mrs. Salas, offering his hand. “I’m Will Sterling.”
“Oh my,” she said, taking it. General Hospital was her favorite show.
“You must’ve been hearing about me,” he said, with a self-deprecating chuckle. He’d somehow managed to shape his body toward her, a curve in his spine that Nora could tell was natural to him, a bedside-manner bend that reminded her of the care workers who’d come at the very end for Nonna.
When he shifted to Mr. Salas, he both maintained it and made it look different; he said, “Hey, I’m Will,” and raised his eyebrows just so at Mr. Salas’s firm handshake, who might as well have said Oh my himself for all the flattered surprise he seemed to take in Will’s reaction.
Nora had to concentrate on not rolling her eyes.
He started to move toward Marian and Emily, and Nora finally found her voice. “I’ve pretty much already introduced you, via your letter,” she said, her voice like ice, and it seemed to blow over the room—all at once her neighbors seemed to remember her and themselves, shaking off their distraction at the new arrival.
Will straightened, apparently feeling the chill, and when he looked over at her, the smile dropped from his lips. In the crowded space, he only had to take a step back from the arc of hastily arranged folding chairs to be beside her, so now it was like they were awkward partners in one of those awful group project assignments from school, the ones where you had to get up in front of the whole class and pretend like one of you wasn’t harboring a terrible bitterness about the uneven work distribution.
Nora cleared her throat, determined to demonstrate—however false it was—that she was the prepared one. “We—”
“I don’t intend to cause any of you trouble,” he said, before she could really begin, and when she shot him an annoyed look she saw the way he’d put his hands up, a gentle, deferential surrender that looked obnoxiously earnest. “In fact I feel lucky I came by to find you all here, because I’d like to—”
“You’d like to explain that you’re taking advantage of a loophole?” Nora snapped, holding up his letter.
Marian made a little hmm! noise, like Nora had scored a point. She would’ve liked to feel encouraged by it, but the way Will turned to Nora—with his eyebrows raised in something like amusement, with his posture still so calm—it made her feel like he was the one winning. He knew he’d caught her flat-footed on those bylaws.
“Doesn’t strike me as much of a loophole,” he said, shrugging. “There’s no prohibition on owners operating short-term rentals. And I’m an owner.”
If she didn’t dislike him so much, she might’ve winced for him. Boy, he’d stepped in it there, acting like Donny had never existed.
“Listen here,” said Jonah. His voice was commanding, but he also weighed 130 pounds and was pointing at Will with one of his knobby, arthritic hands, so the effect was somewhat dulled. “I don’t think you need to be speaking to her that way. She’s in charge here.”
“Yes, sir,” Will said. “I understand she’s your association president, which is why I wrote to her first. But seeing as all of you have lived here for so much longer—”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Marian nearly shouted. “Nora’s been with us for twenty years!”
Ev
en without looking over at him, Nora could feel that Will had turned to look at her. Her whole right side felt hot with his gaze.
For long seconds, no one said a word, and that’s because everyone was waiting for Will to respond. That’s how it worked when it came to Marian Goodnight: if she asked you a question, you answered it, and quick, too. Everyone knew that.
Everyone but Will Sterling.
“I thought you said you moved in last year,” he said, to Nora’s very hot right side.
“Last year!” shouted Jonah. “She lived here when she was in diapers!”
“She never lived here in diapers,” said Mrs. Salas. “You’re thinking of Benny.”
Jonah scratched his head, looked over at Benny, who had, in fact, lived here for a good portion of his childhood. Which was over forty years ago.
“She came when she was nine, Jonah, remember?” said Mr. Salas. “She had a bowl cut.”
Jonah furrowed his thin, white eyebrows, and then he laughed, slapping his knee. “Right! Called her Ringo that first summer.”
Beside him, Benny snorted. “Good thing you grew that out.”
Right and left side—all sides, really—now hot with embarrassment. It was a Herculean task not to touch her ponytail, just to reassure herself it was still there. At the moment, she felt about as awkward as she had when she was nine, standing outside with her parents on the hot-concrete cracked sidewalk with a brand-new suitcase and a whole lot of anxiety.
“You’ve lived here since you were nine?” Will said, and this time—it wasn’t quite a golden-hour echo, but it was softer, quieter. She looked his way.
Brown eyes. He had brown eyes, a shade or two lighter than his hair and eyebrows. It was so easy to notice them now, what with how focused they were on her.
“Uh. It’s complicated.”
“Complicated,” he repeated. She felt pinned by his gaze, by this softly spoken word, and for a second, she forgot about their audience. About what they were doing there in the first place.
Love at First Page 5
