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"Jan," I say.

"Yes."

"When you're back. I want us to have people. Together."

A pause.

"I mean…” I hear myself and correct immediately. “Not! That’s not… I’m not suggesting anything…I just mean friends. A social life. Dinners. Normal things. The kind of thing that's ours and not just mine from before. I want to build that with you." Another pause. "That came out wrong."

There is a silence on the line.

Then Jan says, very carefully: "I understood what you meant the first time."

"I just wanted to be clear." I can hear myself: the backpedalling, the unnecessary qualifier, the full Patrick spiral.

"You were clear," Jan says. Patient. Not unkind.

"I panicked." I close my eyes briefly.

"I noticed." A beat. The Jan beat that means he is not smiling and absolutely is smiling. "Yes, Patrick. Friends. Dinners. I would like that."

"Good," I say. "Great. Yes."

"You panicked about the word together," Jan says.

"I would like to not discuss this further."

"Noted," he says.

"Okay," I say.

"Come home," he says. Then: "I mean… I’ll be home tomorrow. I just…”

"I know what you meant," I say.

I put the phone down and look at the canal and feel what it is to be known — the accurate version of yourself, held without adjustment, by someone who has chosen to know you completely.

Tomorrow Jan comes home.

That is, I find, the whole of it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

JAN

I land at Schiphol at eleven-forty on Thursday morning. Patrick is in the apartment. He doesn't fly to Tokyo until Sunday afternoon, giving us three days. I have been thinking about this since Madrid. About Patrick at Lars's dinner, Sander and Lotte's careful nod across the restaurant, the friends who drifted. About you're my best friend said carefully in the dark from a Madrid hotel room. About what it means to love someone and have them know it not just in the large gestures but in the accumulated weight of ordinary days.

I have taken Thursday afternoon and Friday off.

I told my assistant on Wednesday. She asked if everything was alright. I said yes, I have enough vacation days and there is something more important than the quarterly pipeline. She did not ask what. I appreciated this.

Patrick doesn't know any of this yet.

He is on the sofa when I come through the door, laptop open, the Patrick posture of someone working from home who has been enjoying the lack of a commute. He looks up.

"Hey," he says. Then, reading something in my face or my posture or the fact of me arriving: "You're early."

"I took the afternoon off," I say.