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We stand in the hallway for a long time and neither of us moves and outside the canal does its quiet Thursday evening thing and inside this apartment it is just the two of us and the thing we've said and the thing we've finally stopped not saying.

"Tea?" he says eventually. Into my neck.

"Please," I say.

He pulls back. Looks at me once, the look, the full Jan attention, everything in it. Then he goes to the kitchen.

I stand in the hallway and listen to him fill the kettle and find the cups and move through the space that has become, without either of us planning it, ours.

I think: whatever comes next — the Czech family, the public life, the difficulty and the friction and all the things the world will make complicated — I am ready for it.

I have Jan.

That is, it turns out, sufficient.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

JAN

I wake before six. This is not unusual. What is unusual is that I cannot move. Patrick is on me…not beside me, on me… his full weight distributed across my chest and side, one leg thrown over mine, one arm across my stomach, his face buried in my neck. He is entirely, deeply, committedly asleep in the way of someone who has decided this is where he belongs and has no intention of reconsidering. His breathing is slow and warm against my throat.

I look at the ceiling.

I said it last night. Out loud. I love you — in my own hallway, voice not steady, every wall I have spent thirty-two years constructing lying somewhere on the floor behind me. I said it before I knew if he would say it back. Before there was any net. I said it because I had run out of alternatives and because Ondrej told me to and because standing in front of Patrick with the fear finally fully out of me, I understood that the alternative, not saying it, managing it, filing it indefinitely. was no longer a thing I was capable of.

He said it back.

I have loved you since somewhere over Singapore.

I look at the ceiling. The Friday morning light coming through the curtains. Patrick's weight against my ribs, his heartbeat slow and steady.

It feels… it feels extraordinary. That is the word. Not comfortable, though it is comfortable. Not safe, though it is that too. Extraordinary in the sense of something that exceeds what you had prepared yourself to expect.

I have spent the last several weeks being afraid of this person. Afraid of what it means to need him, afraid of what it would cost me if he left, afraid of the ease he could choose that I cannot offer. And now I am lying in the Friday morning light with Patrick Sutton on my chest, having told him I love him and been told it back, and the fear is still there, I am not naive enough to think one conversation dissolves thirty-two years of architecture, but it is smaller this morning than it was last night. And last night it was smaller than it was on Wednesday. And the direction of travel, I find, is what matters.

I think about the fact that Patrick Sutton is in love with me. I have done this before, this exact thought, and arrived nowhere useful, and I am doing it again now and arriving at the same place: I do not know what I did to deserve this. I am, as of last night, done arguing with it.

He is, I allow myself this in the privacy of six in the morning, extraordinary. Not just the way he looks. The way he sat on the floor outside the bedroom door and waited, asking nothing of me. The remarkable said to two hundred thousand people without blinking. The kind of good that doesn't occur to him to perform.

And he is lying on my chest at six in the morning like a very large, very warm person who has decided I am the most comfortable surface available.

I put my hand on his back. He makes a sound of pure contentment.

I look at the ceiling and feel, with considerable precision: happy.

He wakes up at seven-forty.

I know the moment it happens — the slight change in his breathing, the shift in his weight. He surfaces the way he always does, completely and quietly, and lies there for a moment without moving.

Then he lifts his head.

He looks at me. His hair is wrong. His face is unguarded, someone who has slept deeply and well and is not yet performing any version of himself.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi," I say.

He looks at me for another moment. Then he does what Patrick does, what Patrick has always done, but more so this morning, more completely, he wraps both arms around me and puts his face back in my neck and holds on. Not briefly. Properly. The full enthusiastic version, squeezing slightly, his whole body committing to the hug in the way Patrick commits to everything.