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LOVE AT FIRST
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From Kensington Books
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 four 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, four 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—four a.m. had started to transform for her. Sometimes, she’d do little more than sit and stare, a cup 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 roll-top 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, four 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 four 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 a.m., 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 four 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 naïve 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 this 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 Nora loved it here as much as she did.
“Maybe he’ll have left it to one of us,” Jonah had said last week, during their first building meeting since Donny’s passing. Nora had stood at the front of 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 four a.m. too early to try calling that attorney again?
She let out a gusty sigh, rippling the surface of her still mostly un-drunk dark roast. The fact of the matter was, it was long past time to stop her four a.m. fretting. Maybe she needed to go back to list-making for awhile, 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 right now, 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 four a.m.
Nora knew four 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.