Page 47

He grins and goes back to his photograph.

We come home at four.

The apartment, Friday afternoon, the light doing its late thing through the curtains. Patrick drops onto the sofa with the ease of someone who has decided this is where the rest of the day lives and pulls me down beside him and arranges us — his arm around me, my legs across his, the configuration that has become simply what the sofa is for.

I have my book. He has his phone, one earbud in, the podcast, his hand moving up and down my arm in the slow absent arc that I have been noticing since the beginning and which I have stopped trying not to notice.

We stay like this for a long time.

At some point he says, without looking up from his phone: "My mum invited us for lunch on Saturday."

I look at him.

He looks up. The expression of someone who has been carrying this information and is now deploying it with care. "She called this morning. While you were working. She'd like to — she wants to meet you properly." He pauses. "I told her I'd ask you."

I look at him.

"Your mother," I say.

"Yes."

"For lunch."

"Yes. Saturday." The corner of his mouth goes slightly. "Both of them. Mum and Dad." A pause. "She asked if you liked stamppot."

I look at the canal.

Patrick's mother. Patrick's father. Saturday. Stamppot.

"I like stamppot," I say.

"I know you do." He squeezes my arm. "Is that a yes?"

I look at him. At the warmth of him, the Patrick warmth that is simply present without requiring anything from me — not performance, not management, just there, holding my arm, asking me to lunch.

I think about the thirty-two years. The walls. The architecture. The comment sections and the fear and the five in the morning and everything I said last night in the hallway.

"Yes," I say.

Something opens in his face — relief and warmth together, the expression of something that mattered more than he was showing.

"They're going to love you," he says.

I look at him. "What if they don't."

"They will."

"Patrick." I look at the canal. "What if they think… what if they blame me. For the grandchildren situation." I say it precisely because precision is how I handle things I find difficult. "You could have had children easily. With a woman. With Maya. And now…” I stop. "Your parents might look at me and see the reason that doesn't happen."

He is quiet for a moment.

"Jan," he says.

"I'm just being realistic."

"You're being scared," he says. Gently. "Which is allowed. But I want you to hear me clearly on this." He turns so he can look at me properly. "My parents are not like that. My mother asked if you liked stamppot. My father — my father is quieter, it may take him longer, but he is not a person who measures love in grandchildren." He holds my gaze. "And the children question is not closed. It just looks different. We haven't even begun to talk about what it looks like for us. That conversation is not yours to dread alone."

I look at him for a long moment.