“Nick can stay too,” Dahlia interjected before Nick could answer. “I’ll make up the pullout couch in the living room. It’s too late to catch the train back.”
Nick glanced at the clock above the oven. “It’s not too late, only a little after nine.”
“The next train doesn’t come for another hour, and then it’s an hour back into the city. You won’t get home until almost midnight.”
“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry—”
Dahlia grabbed Nick’s hand and led him away into the living room, not giving him a chance to turn down her offer of hospitality. She instructed Nick to sit on the couch and wait for her to return with fresh sheets and pillows. She also gave him one of Benjamin’s old T-shirts and a pair of shorts to sleep in. Nick did as he was told because apparently, he simply could not refuse anything of the Greene women.
Lily came and stood by the living room mantel and smiled, amused. Sorry, she mouthed.
Nick shrugged. What could he do? In the grand scheme of things, being forced to spend a night on someone’s comfortable pullout couch wasn’t the absolute worst thing to have happened to him over the course of his life.
Then he suddenly realized he actually did have a problem on his hands.
Because staying over meant Lily would be sleeping literal feet away from him down the hall.
13
At around two in the morning, Nick was folded up like an awkward pretzel in an armchair in the corner of the living room. It turned out Lily’s aunt and uncle and their three young kids from Delaware had decided to spend the night as well. Her aunt and uncle took Violet’s room, and Iris’s old room had been converted into an office, so Nick let the children have the pullout couch, because, after all, they were family and he wasn’t. Lily’s younger cousins snored quietly, wrapped up in Dahlia’s soft blankets.
All things considered, the armchair wasn’t too bad. He’d slept in weirder situations. Like in overcrowded hostels or spread out across chairs at airports. And it wasn’t like he was sleeping tonight anyway. Between years spent struggling with insomnia and constant jet lag, stealing sleep here and there was normal for him. It was better that the pullout couch was occupied by people who would actually put it to use.
Was Lily sleeping right now? Most likely. She seemed like the kind of person who slept calmly and didn’t steal covers in the middle of the night.
He stood and walked quietly into the kitchen to get a glass of water, careful not to wake her little cousins. The Greenes’ house, with their big living room and inviting kitchen, reminded Nick of the kind of homes he saw on sitcoms. Large enough to fit a family of five and a surprise fourth baby in a later season, but modest enough that viewers found their lifestyle attainable. He wondered what Teresa would think of their house. When he was younger, she’d always tried to make their apartment look nicer in small ways. Albert would probably ask Dahlia and Benjamin outright how much they paid for their mortgage. Then under the guise of forging a friendship, he might ask Lily’s dad if he played cards. Or he’d ask if he liked football. Did he ever bet on games? Would he like to make some easy money? Then he’d find a way to swindle her dad out of whatever cash he had on him through a bet or a card game where he’d cheat or fudge the rules to his advantage. It sounded ridiculous, but Nick had watched Albert do just that multiple times.
Nick shook off the thoughts about his parents. He filled a glass with water and drained it in two gulps. He peered closer at the photographs covering the fridge. There was a picture of Lily and her sisters when they were little, dressed in matching pastel dresses on Easter. Another of Lily at age two, sitting on Santa’s lap, crying and reaching for whoever held the camera. There was Lily and Violet standing on either side of Iris at her middle school graduation. Lily smiled brightly, while Violet stuck out her tongue. Iris’s smile was slight, a determined glint in her eyes.
Nick wondered about his own childhood pictures. Some existed surely, he just didn’t have much memory of seeing them. Teresa kept two photographs in her wallet. One of Nick as a baby in the hospital the day after he was born, wearing a light blue onesie and a matching newborn hat. The other was a photo of his parents in high school. Albert sported a cocky grin, his arm slung around Teresa’s shoulders as she gazed up at him adoringly.
Nick spotted a more recent picture of Lily and plucked it off the fridge. It was a series of photos that she and Calla had taken in a photo booth. Calla was propped on Lily’s hip and they were grinning at the camera. Violet and Eddy’s Engagement Bash was printed at the bottom in gold lettering. He recognized the yellow dress Lily wore in the photo. She’d worn it the night they ran into each other in the elevator, when she’d witnessed him give that pep talk to Henry. And that somehow led her to believe that he could help her find a date to Violet’s wedding. And that somehow led to him being here at her parents’ house, looking at a photo she’d taken on that night weeks ago. He remembered thinking that she’d looked so pretty, that he wished he had a reason to talk to her. He’d zeroed in on her granola bar and was so nervous he made a silly comment that would probably embarrass him now if he could recall what he’d said.