Danny’s POV
My mother sets a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me and says, without looking up, "The walls in this apartment are very thin, Daniel."
Nora's fork freezes halfway to her mouth.
"Very thin," Mom repeats, pouring herself coffee with the calm precision of a woman who has rehearsed this speech.
"Paper thin, one might say. The kind of thin where a person lying in bed at two in the morning might hear things coming from her son's room that no mother should ever have to process."
"Mom—"
"Things that required me to put on headphones." She sits down across from us, stirring her coffee like she's discussing the weather. "And play gospel music. At full volume. For forty-five minutes."
Nora's face is the color of a fire truck. She's gripping her fork so hard her knuckles have gone white, and she's staring at her eggs like they contain instructions for surviving this moment. They don't. Nothing can save us.
"We'll keep it down," I manage.
"You'll keep it somewhere else." Mom takes a sip of her coffee and pins me with those dark eyes that have never once in twenty-two years let me get away with anything. "I love you both. I love having Nora here. But I am a woman of God, and there are limits."
Three hours later, we're standing in front of our fourth apartment listing of the day, and I'm starting to think homelessness might be the more dignified option.
"That one had actual mushrooms growing from the ceiling," Nora says, scrolling through her phone as we walk. "Not decorative mushrooms. Living organisms establishing a colony in the bathroom."
"The one before that smelled like someone had been pickling human remains."
"And the first one — the landlord asked if we were interested in his crypto podcast. While showing us the bedroom. Which didn't have a door."
"To be fair, he said the door was optional for an extra fifty a month."
She laughs, and the sound does something to my ribs that I'm choosing not to examine in the middle of a sidewalk.
We've been walking the West Side for hours — my territory, my streets, the cracked sidewalks and chain-link fences that Nora's father would use as evidence in his ongoing case against my entire existence.
Every listing in our budget is either a health hazard or a crime scene, and the ones that don't require first and last month's rent plus a security deposit that would drain us both.
The math is brutal. I've been running it in my head since breakfast — my garage work, whatever shifts Nora can pick up once we're settled, the minimum payments I still cover on Mom's medical bills.
We can afford exactly one tier above uninhabitable if we eat ramen four nights a week and never turn on the heat.
"This is the last one," I say, checking the address on my phone. "If it's a disaster, we regroup."
The building sits on the edge of West Side territory — red brick, fire escape zigzagging up the side, a bodega on the ground floor that smells like coffee and something fried.
Third floor, no elevator. The stairs groan under our weight like they're personally offended by the intrusion.
The landlord is a woman in her sixties who introduces herself as Mrs. Delgado and looks at Nora's designer boots with undisguised suspicion.
She unlocks the door and steps aside without a sales pitch, which I respect. The apartment doesn't need one — it either works or it doesn't.
It's a studio. One room that pretends to be three — a sleeping area by the window, a living space in the middle, and a kitchen that I could cross in two strides if I was feeling generous about what counts as a stride.
The radiator in the corner is already clanging, even though nobody asked it to. The windows are drafty enough that I can feel cold air bleeding through the glass from six feet away.
And the wallpaper. Jesus, the wallpaper — some faded floral pattern from the seventies, peeling at the corners, bubbled in places where moisture has been waging a slow war against the adhesive for decades.
It's the kind of wallpaper that makes you wonder if the previous tenant left voluntarily.
I watch Nora take it in. Every detail. The peeling corners. The water stain on the ceiling that looks vaguely like Florida. The kitchen counter with its cigarette burns and chipped laminate. The window that rattles when a truck passes on the street below.
My chest tightens. She grew up in a house with white columns and manicured hedges. Her bathroom was bigger than this entire apartment. Her closet had better lighting.
I wait for the flinch. The polite smile that means absolutely not. The diplomatic suggestion that we keep looking, maybe expand our search radius, maybe consider that love doesn't actually have to live in a place where the walls are literally decomposing.
Nora turns to me. Her eyes are bright, her chin lifted, and she's wearing an expression I can't decode for the life of me.
"It's ours," she says.
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
"The radiator works, the stove has four burners, and Mrs. Delgado looks like she doesn't tolerate nonsense." Nora turns to the landlord. "When can we move in?"
Mrs. Delgado looks between us. Her suspicion hasn't fully dissolved, but something in Nora's voice — the certainty, the lack of performance — makes her nod slowly.
"First and last month. No pets. No parties after eleven." She points at me. "You fix anything that breaks yourself. I'm not a handyman."
"Deal," I say, before my brain can catch up to what my mouth just committed us to.
We sign the lease on Mrs. Delgado's kitchen table while her cat judges us from the top of the refrigerator.
Nora's signature is neat, precise, the handwriting of someone who was trained to make even her name look presentable. Mine is a mess.
My hand won't stop shaking, though I'd rather eat the pen than admit it.
We move in that afternoon with two duffel bags and everything we own, which turns out to be almost nothing.
Nora's clothes, my tools, a toothbrush each. Raf shows up with a borrowed mattress strapped to the roof of his truck and a six-pack he calls a housewarming gift.
"Place has character," he says, eyeing the wallpaper.
"Place has structural concerns," I correct.
"Same thing." He claps me on the shoulder, grins at Nora, and leaves us alone in our apartment. Our apartment. The words don't feel real yet. Like I'm trying on a coat that belongs to someone with a better life.
The mattress won't arrive until tomorrow — Raf's borrowed one turned out to be a single, and I'm not letting Nora sleep on something that smells like it survived a frat house. So we lie on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the water stain that looks like Florida.
The radiator clangs. The window rattles. Somewhere below us, Mrs. Delgado's television murmurs through the floorboards, the volume turned up high enough to suggest she's already anticipating a repeat of my mother's gospel music situation.
"Danny?"
"Yeah?"
Nora rolls onto her side, pressing her face into my shoulder. Her hand finds my chest, fingers spreading over my ribs like she's checking that my heart is still where she left it.
Her body is warm against mine, and the floor is cold, and somehow the combination makes this the most comfortable I've ever been.
"This is the first home I've ever chosen," she whispers.
My throat closes around something I don't have a name for. I press my lips to her forehead and hold them there, breathing her in — soap and cold air and something underneath that's just her, just Nora, just the girl who walked away from everything and chose a studio with decomposing wallpaper because I was in it.
"Yeah," I say against her hair. "Mine too."
She curls closer. The radiator clangs its approval. And for the first time in my life, the walls around me don't feel like they're keeping something out.
They feel like they're holding something together.