Page 37

"No," I say.

"Does he know any of what you've just told me? The fear, the—"

"No." My voice is flat. I am aware of how it sounds.

A pause. Long enough that I can hear him breathing. Then: "You're carrying this alone."

"Yes."

"And Patrick doesn't know."

"He would try to fix it. He would say all the right things and I would believe him and then—" I stop.

"And then what," Ondrej says.

I look at the canal.

"And then I would have given him everything," I say. "And if he leaves I don’t… I don't know who I am after that. I have never…” My voice is doing something I don't care for. I stop and wait for it to level. "I have never let anyone in this far. I don't know how to do this and not be destroyed by it if it goes wrong."

Ondrej is quiet for a long time.

"Jan," he says finally. "That is the most honest thing I have heard you say in thirty years."

I say nothing.

"Tell him," Ondrej says. "Not to fix it. Not to get a guarantee. Just because he deserves to know what he means to you. And because you deserve to not carry it alone." A pause. "You have been carrying things alone your whole life. You don't have to be."

I look at the canal.

"He's back tomorrow morning," I say.

"I know," he says.

We talk for another half an hour about nothing. When we hang up it is past midnight. I am not less afraid. But I am less alone in it.

I go to sleep at two.

I wake up at five and give up on sleeping.

Patrick texts from the aircraft at six: landing 07:20, coming straight to you. I read it and type back okay and put the phone down.

By the time I hear the door at eight-fifteen I have constructed and dismantled approximately four arguments for telling him and four against.

Not dramatically. Patrick comes through the door just after eight in the morning — crew bag, the look of someone who has been in the air all night and wants to be home. He drops his bag in the hallway, finds me at the kitchen table with the quarterly report I have not been reading, and kisses the top of my head and goes to make tea.

I watch him move through my kitchen. The ease of him in this space, knowing where everything is, knowing where he belongs, the unhurried quality of someone who has come home.

I look back at the quarterly report.

And then Patrick's phone rings.

He answers it. I hear his voice from the sitting room, the warm, easy version, someone he knows, and then a laugh, and then a silence, and I am not listening but I hear something in the quality of the silence that makes me look up.

He appears in the kitchen doorway.

"That was someone from the channel," he says. "Another aviation YouTuber, bigger following. He wants to do a collab, visiting each other's cities, filming around Amsterdam. He mentioned bringing his partner." He looks at his phone. "He thought it could be nice for viewers to see us together. Said it would probably land well."

I look at him.