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To two hundred thousand people. In the same voice he uses when he tells me something true. He sat in a plain shirt and looked at a camera and said: he's remarkable and I am very lucky.

I had called it contentment for so long that I never thought to examine the definition.

I pick up my phone and I call him.

He answers on the second ring.

"Hey," he says. Slightly breathless. "Did you…”

"Yes," I say.

A pause. "And?"

I look at the canal. At the Monday afternoon light on the water. At the city I chose for myself when I was twenty-two with one suitcase and a list, which has become, without my planning it, the city where this happened.

"Remarkable," I say.

A pause. Then I can hear him smiling, that particular intake of breath he has when something lands. "I meant it."

"I know," I say. My voice is not entirely what it usually is. "Patrick."

"Yeah." Quieter now.

"Come home."

A beat. The sound of his breathing, the city behind him. Then: "I'm already on my way."

I put the phone down. I sit for a moment with it in my hands.

He is home in twenty minutes.

He comes through the door still in his running clothes and finds me in the sitting room and doesn't say anything. He just looks at me for a moment, that look, the full attention, the one that makes me feel seen in a way I have not been accustomed to and have stopped trying to deflect, and then he takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom and closes the door.

There is nothing frantic about it. That is the thing I notice, even here, even now, the quality of Patrick when he wants something, which is not urgency but depth. He takes his time. He kisses me like the afternoon has nowhere to be and neither do we.

He says my name at some point. Not a question. Just my name, in the dark of the afternoon, the way he always does, with everything in it.

I close my eyes and let it be what it is.

After.

He is on his back and I am on his chest, my head rising and falling with his breathing, his arm around me. The afternoon light through the curtains. The canal outside.

"You're thinking," Patrick says.

"Always."

His hand keeps moving. "Loudly."

"I was thinking," I say, "that I don't know what I did to deserve you."

He is quiet for a moment.

"Jan," he says. His hand stills on my back. I feel him turn his face slightly, his mouth against my hair.

"Yes."

A pause. His arm tightens around me, pulling me closer, deliberate. "I don't know what I did to deserve you either." His voice is quiet. Unhurried. "And I'm not going to question it."