Page 36

We go back to the film. He pays for lunch, which he does when he thinks something is wrong and doesn't know how else to say so.

I walk home.

By Wednesday evening I have read the comment seven times, reorganised the kitchen cupboards, and gone to the gym twice, the second time at nine in the evening, which I never do, because the alternative was lying on the sofa thinking about a comment left by a stranger on the internet.

I am aware this is not proportionate.

I am having difficulty caring about proportionality.

Then Ondrej calls.

I should not answer. It is eleven at night, I am not in a state to have a conversation, and Ondrej has known me since we were fourteen and will hear everything I am not saying within thirty seconds. I know all of this. I answer anyway.

"Hey," he says. His voice is the same as always — warm, unhurried, Ondrej at eleven at night on a weekday as if this is entirely normal.

"Hey." I sit down on the kitchen chair.

A pause. The Ondrej pause — patient, assembling. I can almost hear him deciding how to approach it. "What's wrong."

"Nothing." I look at the window.

"Jan." Gentle. No pressure in it.

"I'm fine."

"You answered on the first ring," he says. "You never answer on the first ring."

I look at the canal. The Wednesday evening dark on the water.

"Patrick is in New York," I say.

"I know. I saw the Instagram." Another pause. "And?"

I am quiet for a moment.

"Jan," he says. Gently. The voice he uses when he has decided to press and has also decided to be careful about it. "Talk to me."

So I do.

Not everything. But enough. The comment. Finn at the bar. The collab DM. The specific weight of being adjacent to Patrick's public life in a way I had not fully anticipated. Wednesday evening alone in the apartment with Patrick on the other side of the world and the comment still there every time I close my eyes.

Ondrej listens.

When I finish he is quiet for a moment. I know this quiet — the quiet of someone choosing whether to say the thing or the softer version. With Ondrej it is usually the thing.

"You're doing the Lukas thing," he says.

I close my eyes. "This is nothing like Lukas."

"The mechanism is the same. You have something real and you are building the case against it before anything has happened."

"Lukas left," I say. "That's what happened."

"Lukas never knew you loved him," Ondrej says. "That's what happened. You never gave him the information." A pause. "Does Patrick know how you feel?"

I don't answer. I look at the wall of the kitchen, the canal dark outside the window, the ordinary geometry of my apartment at midnight.

"Jan." Quieter now. He has arrived at something.