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"Marriage comes first," he says. Casually. Like this is a minor administrative point.

I put the glass down again. I look at him. He is washing a bowl. He does not appear to notice that I have stopped breathing.

"What do you mean," I say.

"I mean…” He glances at me. "You don't want to be my husband?"

There is a silence.

I look at Jan. At his profile, the side of his face, the completely ordinary way he is standing at the sink with a bowl in his hands like he hasn't just said the thing he just said. Like he didn't just drop the most significant sentence of the year into a Saturday evening washing-up and then wait.

I know this about him. This is Jan. Jan who filed the date. Jan who took care of me when I was sick. Jan who says the true thing plainly and without ceremony and then stands there and lets it land.

My chest is doing something I don't have a precise word for.

"Jan," I say. My voice comes out differently than I intended.

He keeps washing the bowl. He does not look at me.

"Yes."

"Are you proposing to me." I put the cloth down.

He considers this. "I'm asking if you want to be proposed to."

I stare at him. He is entirely composed. He is the most infuriating, precise, extraordinary person I have ever met and I am so comprehensively in love with him that I have no words that are adequate.

"Would you want to?" I say. "Propose."

He looks at me for a long moment.

"Nothing," he says carefully, "would make me more certain about something in my life."

I look at him.

"Yes," I say. "God, yes. I want to be your husband."

He nods. Once. The conclusive Jan nod.

"All in the right time," he says.

Then he takes my face in both hands and kisses me — properly, thoroughly, the full version, the one that says everything without using words, and I put my arms around him and hold on and feel the full enormous quiet weight of what just happened in a kitchen at nine-thirty on a Saturday in December.

He pulls back, goes back to the washing up. I stand in the kitchen for a moment.

"Jan," I say.

"Yes."

"Did we just…”

"Hold your horses," he says. "You moved in a few weeks ago. I'm not that easy."

I laugh. I can't help it.

"Besides," he says, still looking at the bowl, "if I were to propose, it would not be in the kitchen."

I look at him. "Where would it be?"