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Then: Did you—

Then nothing for four minutes. Then: I opened it.

Then: Jan.

I put the phone face down and pay attention to the meeting for the remaining forty minutes, which requires more discipline than usual.

When the meeting ends I pick up the phone.

Seven messages. The last one: I don't know what to say.

I type: You don't have to say anything.

Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again. Disappear.

Then: You cleared a drawer.

Yes.

For me.

For your things. You're here often enough.

A long pause. Then: Jan.

Patrick.

I don't know what to say, he sends again. Which is, I understand, Patrick's way of saying something very large that has not yet found its words.

You don't have to say anything, I send again. It's a drawer.

Then I put the phone away and go to the next meeting.

I fly back from London on Thursday evening. Heathrow to Schiphol, the exhaustion of three days of meetings that were useful and also relentless.

Patrick is there. He is on the sofa with his tea and his phone and the settled quality of someone who has been somewhere long enough to stop noticing they are somewhere. He looks up when I come in.

He is off the sofa before I have fully closed the door.

Both arms around me, properly, immediately, the full Patrick version, and his face in my neck and his weight against me and my bag still on my shoulder. I put my free arm around him. He holds on.

"Hi," he says. Into my neck.

"Hi," I say.

He pulls back just enough to kiss me. Not briefly. The kind of kiss that means he has been waiting and is not pretending otherwise. I let him. I am, I find, not in any hurry.

When he pulls back he looks at me with the expression I have come to think of as Patrick's version of relief — the one he has when something he wanted is now simply here.

I put my bag down. I go to the kitchen. I hear him follow.

He leans in the kitchen doorway.

I pour the tea.

"The Calvin Klein thing," he says.

"Mm."