Love at First Read online

  But then he heard his mother’s voice through the screen, through the smudgy black rectangle he’d forgotten he was meant to be watching.

  “We need help,” she was saying. “My husband and I, both of us . . . we are begging you for help.”

  And for the third time that day, Will’s heart changed inside his chest.

  He made himself listen; he made himself completely still. If the girl saw him now, she might mistake him for a statue. A tomato-catching lawn ornament she’d never noticed before.

  But for those long, life-altering minutes while he listened to his mother and to the uncle he’d never met, while he heard a conversation that made his skin turn clammy with shock, he didn’t think about the girl at all.

  He’d remember later how loudly and abruptly it had ended: his mother raising her voice to tell Donny that he was cruel and stubborn, that he would regret this. That if he let her leave now, he would never see her or Will again.

  He’d remember that there was absolute silence in response.

  Will had dropped his hands when he’d heard that silence, barely noticing the tomatoes tumbling to the ground. He’d moved to the stairs, moved to get his mother, to make sure they started making good on that ultimatum immediately, but she beat him to it, opening the screen and following his same path out of the apartment, her face pale. When she was close enough, he could see her cheeks were wet with tears. She did not look at him as she passed him by, but somehow, he could tell.

  He could tell she knew that he’d heard.

  He followed her to the car, for the first time in a long time feeling like he had to make an effort to keep up with her short-legged stride as she crossed the yard—under the tree and out the other side, into the rear alley where they’d parked not even all that long ago.

  He was in the passenger seat, watching his mother’s hands shake as she fumbled with her keys, before he even thought of the girl. Her voice, her laugh, her nonna and squirrels and spoiled tomatoes. He thought of how silly it was, that he had noticed her. That she had felt so important to notice. Everything about his world felt silly—school, summer, Caitlin, baseball—everything that wasn’t this, what he’d heard his mother say and what she and his dad were desperate enough to ask. Everything about himself felt silly—his restlessness, his moods, his absurd crushes on tomato-throwing strangers, his stupid fucking eyes, and his ridiculous, immature vanity.

  He reached out and touched his mother’s wrist.

  “Mom,” he said, and he made a decision right then, right when he heard his own voice again. He decided he would catch up to the way his voice had grown up. He decided that what he had overheard being said in that apartment meant that he had to.

  “We’re okay,” she said, and he thought maybe she said it more to herself than to him, but still she moved to clutch his hand, squeezing it and steadying herself.

  “We’re okay,” she repeated.

  He said it back to her. Multiple times, until she was calm enough to start the car.

  When she backed out, he wanted—for a desperate, fleeting second—to look back up toward the sky, toward that third-floor balcony. Toward the girl with the lovely voice and the long ponytail. The girl he hadn’t really been able to see at all.

  But he didn’t.

  He was done with blurry distractions. He was done with being a kid.

  On Monday morning, he called an eye doctor with an office in a strip mall close enough that he could ride his bike to it and made an appointment, knowing already he’d fail every single test they’d surely give him. That same afternoon, he showed up for summer practice only so he could quit the team, and he ignored every one of Coach’s shocked, confused protests, the same way he ignored Caitlin’s when he broke up with her only a few hours later.

  He didn’t let himself think about the girl on the balcony at all.

  He was seeing clearly now.

  Chapter 1

  Sixteen years later

  For Eleanora DeAngelo Clarke, the best time of day was, many people would argue, not daytime at all.

  The best time of day was before dawn.

  It was a fairly recent development, this fondness for 4:00 a.m. When she’d first come back, it hadn’t been so much a choice as a necessity, the demand of days that started early and stretched long, the fallout from frequently disrupted sleep. During those times, 4:00 a.m. had felt indistinguishable from every other hour of the day: darker in quality but not really in character, another part of the grim, human process of saying goodbye that she hadn’t felt—wouldn’t have ever felt—prepared to go through.

  When it had been over, though, when the daylight hours became busier and more bureaucratic, when the reality of her new life had started to sink in—4:00 a.m. had started to transform for her. Sometimes, she’d do little more than sit and stare, a mug of hot coffee cupped in her palms, steaming straight into her puffy, tear-stained face. Sometimes, she rose from a restless, unsatisfying sleep and walked to the back door, sliding it open and taking a single step onto the balcony, breathing in the crisp, cold autumn air like it was medicine. Sometimes, she’d sit at the old rolltop desk in the living room, making lists to help her move through the day, to help her feel in control in this place where she’d never once, not in her whole life, had to be in control before.

  But day by day, 4:00 a.m. took on a softer rhythm, and Nora moved to its beats with some improved version of those early, impulsive behaviors. In the pitch dark and perfect quiet, she sipped at her coffee and stayed inside when it was cold, letting her body and brain wake up slowly, softly. She left the lists to later, letting herself breathe. She let herself think and not think, remember and not remember. She let herself be.

  Eight months on and 4:00 a.m. had become habit, a secret practice she’d even put a name to. At night, when she got in bed, she’d open the clock app on her phone and toggle on the alarm she’d titled “Golden Hour.” She’d close her eyes and look forward to it, to the reset it always seemed to provide her, to the gentle welcome it always seemed to give her to the day ahead.

  Four in the morning, she’d started to think, could fix pretty much anything.

  Except.

  Except for this.

  It’d been two and a half weeks since it’d happened, and every day since, Nora had spent 4:00 a.m. exactly like she was right now: sitting on the balcony, still in her pajamas, fretting.

  And it was all Donny Pasternak’s fault.

  Nora knew it was a terrible thing to think, a terrible thing to feel. Who could blame a man for dying, after all, especially a man so quiet and kind as Donny? Who could sit in judgment of someone—a neighbor, a friend, practically a family member—who’d left this world so suddenly, so unexpectedly, so prematurely? Who could be so . . . so angry?

  Well, the answer was Nora.

  Nora could.

  You’re not angry at Donny, she scolded herself. You know that’s not it.

  She took a sip of her coffee, trying to get that golden hour feeling again. It was a perfect not-quite-morning, warm and dry and pleasant, the kind she’d waited for all through her first dark, brutal Chicago winter.

  But it didn’t work.

  She was angry. She was angry and stressed and scared, because quiet, kind Donny Pasternak was gone, and that was bad enough, especially so soon after Nonna. But beyond that—beyond that, there was the terrible realization that being Donny’s neighbor and friend and almost family member turned out to mean exactly nothing when it came to finding out what would happen to his apartment.

  Nora had never been naive about how outsiders judged the old, brick, blocky six-flat that was, for the first time in her adult life, her full-time home, though the precise nature of the judgments had changed over the years. When she’d first come to visit, her parents had spent the whole drive from the airport speaking quietly—well, not that quietly—to each other about Nonna wasting years of money and effort on this “little building” when she could’ve stayed in her perfectly nice, paid-off
house in the suburbs after her husband, Nora’s grandfather, passed. Two decades later and the judgments were different: Wasn’t it the most dated-looking building on the block? Shouldn’t it try to do a little better to keep up? Hadn’t anyone considered making it brighter, more modern? Was that striped wallpaper in the hallways made of . . . velvet?

  The problem was, people didn’t appreciate a classic. People had no loyalty!

  Nonna had always been saying that.

  Nora closed her eyes, thinking of what Nonna might say now. She probably would say that Donny wasn’t people. She would say that she trusted Donny—that Donny, like everyone else in the building who had been her neighbor, her family (no almost about it!), for years and years, would’ve made sure the apartment would be left in good hands, left to someone who understood what it was all about here. In fact, that’s what everyone else in the building seemed to think, too. Nonna, after all, had left her apartment to Nora, because she’d known that Nora would take extra care. She’d known that Nora loved the building as much as she did.

  “Maybe he’ll have left it to one of us,” Jonah had said only the week before, during their first building meeting since Donny’s passing. Nora had stood at the front of the room, the concrete floor of the basement laundry room a hard press of reality against the soles of her sneakers. She watched the faces of her neighbors light in hope, and she’d thought of the three unreturned phone calls she’d made to Donny’s attorney.

  I think we would’ve already heard, she’d thought. I think we would’ve heard if it was one of us.

  But she hadn’t said that. She’d pasted on a smile and said, “I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” clutching the building bylaws in her hand with a sense of impending doom. If it wasn’t one of them, she didn’t know who it could be, because in addition to being quiet and kind, Donny was also, for as long as she’d known him, alone. No girlfriend, no boyfriend, no friends or family outside these walls.

  Was 4:00 a.m. too early to try calling that attorney again?

  She let out a gusty sigh, rippling the surface of her still mostly undrunk dark roast. The fact of the matter was, it was long past time to stop her 4:00 a.m. fretting. Maybe she needed to go back to list-making for a while, because those unreturned phone calls almost certainly meant something bad was in the offing: some faceless property investment firm was probably combing through Cook County death records even as she ruminated, looking for opportunities to do one of those quick turnaround “flips.” They’d show up and park a dumpster out front and toss all of quiet, kind Donny Pasternak’s things, and they would absolutely complain about the hallway wallpaper (No loyalty! Nonna sniffed, from somewhere). A month later there’d be a “For Sale” sign for Donny’s apartment in the front courtyard with a sticker price that’d start spelling the end for this building that Nonna had made a second life in, this building that had—with a bit of fate and a lot of effort—become a family all its own.

  She sighed again—it was a real woe is me situation during this particular golden hour—untucked her feet, and stood from her chair, stretching into a posture that was stiff, upright, preparatory. There had to be something she could do other than simply . . . waiting like this.

  But right then, she heard a door slide open somewhere below her.

  Nora knew 4:00 a.m.

  Nora knew 4:00 a.m. in this building.

  And she knew no one—besides her—ever came out onto their balcony at this hour.

  No one except.

  No one except . . . someone new.

  Nora realized that it would be, by all accounts, extremely inappropriate to rush to her balcony railing, hang her head over the side, and ask whomever was down there how they felt about vintage wallpaper. First of all, the sun wasn’t even up yet. Second of all, she was not wearing a bra beneath her pajamas. Third of all, if wallpaper was the only conversation opener she could think of at that moment, it was truly time to make good on her intentions to start getting out more.

  Maybe it was the attorney with questionable phone etiquette? Or worse! The actual face of the faceless property investment firm? Sure it was early, but maybe these people needed the whole twenty-four hours in any given day to carry out their terrible, wallpaper-hating plans? She was absolutely not prepared to have this confrontation, not without a bra and a PowerPoint presentation about the mercenary nature of real estate trends.

  Bra first, she told herself, reaching a hand toward the door handle before pausing again.

  What if it’s not one of those two people?

  She couldn’t really explain it, the feeling she had—the feeling that she shouldn’t go inside quite yet, the feeling that the person who’d slid open that door was someone she should meet.

  Of course, there remained the problem of the early hour, and her lack of supporting undergarments, and also her apparently limited ideas for what she might actually say, so she decided that, at least for the time being, she’d try to make this meeting one-sided. Carefully, she set down her coffee on the small patio table beside her chair, and—grateful for the quiet of her bare feet against the wood and her long-honed awareness of which boards were likeliest to creak—silently stepped toward the railing, tucking herself into one of the empty spaces between her many potted plants.

  And then she peeked over the edge, down and across to Donny’s balcony.

  She saw him first as a dark outline, limned by the lights left on in the apartment, her perspective from above him giving her only an impression of his body—hands gripping the railing that jutted out slightly farther than her own; long arms spread wide, triangles of empty space between them and the lean waist that fanned out into a broad, curving back; head bowed low between the tense set of his shoulders.

  It was like looking at a sculpture, a piece of art, something that took all of your attention. Something that insisted you stay right in the moment you were in, something that told you to memorize what you were seeing. She could’ve looked and looked. Until the sun came up. Until the golden hour was over for real.

  But then, it hit her.

  This was not the posture of a property man who needed a PowerPoint presentation.

  This curved-back, bowed-head balcony lean was the posture of a man who was . . . grieving?

  She sucked in a surprised breath and, too quickly, stepped away from her railing.

  And knocked over one of her plants.

  The sound of the terra-cotta hitting the wood, the sound of a clump of dirt scattering in its wake, the sound of the waxy leaves swishing in the trembling aftermath of their fall—all of it, Nora thought, sounded like the actual loudest noise that had ever been released in the entire history of the known universe.

  She squeezed her eyes shut tight. She tried to make herself completely still, the way he had been. If she pulled it off, maybe the man on the balcony would think a rogue, third-floor-exclusive wind had knocked over the pot. Or some kind of critter? Yes, that made sense. A raccoon, or a particularly forceful sq—

  “Hello?”

  His voice was deep, but he spoke the word quietly, cautiously, and Nora supposed she could ignore it, keep on with the whole sculpture-posture idea until he went back inside. Later (with bra), she could go down and introduce herself, express her genuine condolences, and keep secret her nascent, selfish sense of hope that Donny may have done right by them after all.

  It felt a little mean to ignore him, though, after she’d been spying and all, and also after she’d spent the past half hour being unjustifiably angry in the general direction of his recently deceased possible relative. A quick hello, then. An apology for disturbing him. No questions about his feelings regarding classic wall coverings.

  She stepped back toward the railing, at the last second remembering to cross her arms over her chest.

  This time, when she peeked over the edge, he was looking up at her.

  He was tall; she could tell even from high above, and that was down to how well she knew this building, how every person in it looke
d in relation to its various structures—its railings, its overhangs, its doorways. Standing upright, his shoulders still looked broad, but overall, he seemed leaner to her outside of that bent-over posture she’d first seen him in. Maybe it was something about the clothes he wore—too dark to see him well, but they seemed to fit him loosely, pajama-like, and she liked that, thinking that they might both be out on their balconies, still in their sleepwear.

  But it was what she could see of his face—bathed in the warm, golden light from the apartment—that made her breath catch, that made time stop. He was clean-shaven, his jaw square, his brow lowered in an expression to match the question that had been in his voice. Those sharp outlines might have been attractive all on their own, but they were improved—they were made stunning, really—by the soft curves that complemented them. Thick, wavy hair, messy in a way that made Nora wonder if there was perhaps an extremely flattering first-floor-exclusive wind. Full lips, slightly parted. She could only assume about his eyes, because they were hidden from her by the glare off his dark-rimmed glasses.

  She swallowed.

  “Hey,” she finally whispered back to him.

  For a few seconds, he didn’t move at all, and she thought he seemed so good at that, staying still. Like, professionally good at it. Maybe he’s a mime, said the extremely stunned part of her brain. No, a castle guard, she amended. Still stunned, obviously, given the absolute dearth of castles in, you know, Illinois.

  But then he lifted his right hand. Slowly, he raised it to the center of his chest, his broad palm rubbing once across his sternum, toward his heart.

  “You . . . ,” he said, his hand resting there, right over his heart, and Nora had the wild urge to count the beats of her own. One-two, one-two.