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"Jan."

"Yes."

"I have no apartment." He looks at his phone. Then at me. Then at the room around us — the sofa from Czaar Peterstraat now against the wall, the grandmother's lamp in the corner by the window, the books shelved alongside mine. "I live here. This is… I live here."

His voice does something.

I look at him. At Patrick, who is sitting in the middle of what is now genuinely and completely our apartment, with four hundred and thirty euros, no second apartment, and exactly where he wants to be.

"Yes," I say. "You do."

He looks at me for a long moment.

"This is your apartment now," I say. “Not… we don't need documents for that. It's mine and you live here and that means it's yours too." I look at him. "I should have said that more clearly before. I'm saying it now."

He stares at me.

"We'll register your address here officially," I say. "That's just paperwork. The actual thing is simpler. You live here. This is where you live."

He stares at me for another moment.

Then he puts his face in his hands and makes a sound that is somewhere between a laugh and something else entirely.

"Jan Novak," he says. Into his hands.

"Yes."

He lifts his face. His eyes are bright. "You are the most…” He stops. Shakes his head. "I love you so much."

"I know," I say. "Sign the documents when they arrive."

He laughs, and pulls me in and I go and we sit in our apartment in the November Amsterdam evening and I feel, simply and completely, that the shape of my life has finally become accurate.

— — —

The American football arrives by accident.

This is Patrick's fault. He puts something on the television on a Sunday afternoon in November and I am on the sofa beside him with my book, not watching, until I look up.

I watch for a moment. "What sport is this."

"American football."

"You follow American football."

"I played it in high school," he says. Casually. Like this is normal information. "Before I got serious about aviation."

I look at him. "You played American football."

"Wide receiver," he says. "I was fast."

I look at the screen. Then back at him. Then at the screen again. I file this, and return to what is on the television.

I look at the screen for approximately forty more seconds.

"Explain the down system to me," I say.

He looks at me.