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CHAPTER ONE

JAN

My phone lights up at six forty-three on a Tuesday morning. I am already awake — I am always already awake — at the gym two streets from my apartment, thirty-two minutes into my session, heart rate where I want it. The phone is on the shelf in front of me, face-up, which is not my usual habit. I put it there this morning without deciding to.

The message is from Patrick.

Good morning, boyfriend.

I look at it. I keep running. My heart rate goes up two points, which I attribute to the incline I set four minutes ago and not to the word boyfriend, which I read three more times before putting the phone face-down on the shelf and focusing on the wall ahead.

Boyfriend.

I consider this word for the remaining eighteen minutes of my run. It is, technically, accurate. We have been on a date. We kissed on a canal bridge one evening in May, walked home slowly, texted afterwards, and have seen each other every day Patrick has been in the city since. Those days, the way they have accumulated into something that now simply is, are something I have been examining in private and not yet finished examining.

I finish. I shower. I walk back to my apartment in the early Amsterdam morning, the canals grey-green and flat, a cyclist passing with a crate of bread on the back. I make coffee. I sit at the kitchen table.

I pick up my phone.

Good morning. Boyfriend? I type.

His response comes in eleven seconds, which means he was waiting.

Yeah, boyfriend. Is that not what we are?

I look at the canal for a moment. Then: It is.

Good, he types. Good morning, boyfriend.

Good morning, I type back.

I drink my coffee. Outside a boat moves slowly through the water, the chug of its engine fading under the bridge. I have lived in this apartment for six years and had breakfast alone at this table for most of them and I am aware of the difference between this morning and those mornings. It is the difference between a room with the light off and the same room with the light on. The room was always there.

I refill my coffee. I open my laptop. I have a report due Thursday and a call at nine and a full week ahead of me.

Patrick leaves for Singapore this afternoon.

He will be back Friday. This is four days. Four days feels longer than it should.

I am already thinking about what to make for dinner. He likes lamb — something I noted once, filed, and have not forgotten. I will make lamb.

This is what three weeks as Patrick Sutton’s boyfriend looks like, from the inside.

There is a jacket on my coat hook that is not mine. There is a mug on my kitchen shelf — his, left behind one evening, washed and put away by me, somehow never returned — that has simply become part of the shelf. It is not a coffee mug. Patrick drinks tea, which I find quietly unreasonable. I have not said so. There is a biography, ’The Wright Brothers’ by David McCullough, between my self-help books and my finance texts. I did not buy it. I have not read it. It is simply there now.

He has not stayed the night. Not yet.

I have thought about it. Waking up beside him — the canal light through the curtains, Patrick before the day has started. More than I find comfortable to admit.

The reason it hasn’t happened is not indifference.

The reason it hasn’t happened is that I am not entirely confident I could lie beside him in the early morning and do nothing about it, and it is not my move to make.

When he’s away he sends me things. A photo of an approach he found beautiful. A menu he thinks I’d have opinions about. Once, a forty-second voice note from a hotel room in Cape Town describing the view because he said he couldn’t do it justice in text.

I listened to it four times. That felt reasonable.

When he is home, I have dinner ready. He walks in and drops his bag and I hear him in the hallway, the zip of his jacket, the particular sound of his shoes coming off, and he comes through to the kitchen and says hi and I say hi and sometimes that’s all that’s needed.