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"Jan," I say.

"Yes."

"This is my side," I say. "Usually I'm the one…”

"I know," he says. "Go to sleep."

I go to sleep.

On Sunday morning, while Jan is in the shower, Peter sits at the kitchen table with his coffee and looks at me.

"He's different to how I imagined," he says.

"Different how."

"Funnier," he says. "I thought from your descriptions he might be…I don't know. More austere."

"He is austere," I say.

"He's dry," Peter says. "That's different from austere. Austere doesn't have a sense of humour. Jan's sense of humour is just very quiet." He drinks his coffee. "He's also very…” He pauses. "He watches you," he says. "When you don't know he's watching. You say something and he files it. I noticed it at dinner."

I look at the kitchen table.

"I know," I say.

"It's not surveillance," Peter says. "It's the opposite. It's… he's paying attention because he wants to know you. All of it." He pauses. "I've met some of your girlfriends, Patrick. They were good people. But none of them looked at you like that."

I look at my tea.

"No," I say.

Peter is quiet for a moment. "I'm glad you found him," he says. Simply. The way Peter says things that mean a lot. "That's all I wanted to say."

He goes back to his coffee. Jan comes out of the shower. The Sunday morning continues.

I carry the thing Peter said with me for the rest of the day. Not as a weight, as a warmth. The warmth of being seen by someone who has known you all the way back, and loved by someone who is learning you all the way forward.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

JAN

Patrick gets sick on Sunday evening. I notice it before he does — something about him on the sofa after Peter leaves, slightly wrong. The colour not quite right. The way he is sitting, which is not the comfortable Patrick sprawl but something more careful, like someone who is managing something they haven't named yet.

"You're warm," I say.

"I'm fine," he says.

I put my hand on his forehead.

He is not fine. His temperature is 38.4°C, which I know because I take his temperature with the thermometer I keep in the bathroom cabinet. Patrick looks at the reading with the expression of someone receiving unexpected information.

"It's probably nothing," he says.

"Probably," I say.

I make him tea. I find the paracetamol. I tell him to go to bed.

He goes to bed, which tells me more than the thermometer did.