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"What was?"

"A social life that belongs to both of us." He squeezes my hand.

"Yes," I say. "Exactly."

I look at the canal.

We walk home in the autumn Amsterdam night and come inside and fall onto the sofa and Patrick pulls me into him and I go, entirely, completely, without argument, and we fall asleep there before we make it to the bed.

It is, I find, one of the better Saturdays of my life.

Which is not something I expected to say about rain, colleagues, and a man asleep on my sofa.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PATRICK

Jan is quiet on the plane. Not the usual Jan quiet — the focused, productive, reading-or-thinking quiet that I have come to know well. This is different. He has his book open and is not reading it. He is looking at the window with the expression of someone watching something I cannot see.

I don't ask.

I have learned, over the months of this, when Jan needs to be asked and when he needs to be let alone with what he's carrying. This is the second kind. I can see it in the set of his shoulders slightly higher than usual, the tension he doesn't know he's holding, and in the quality of his stillness, which is not the easy stillness of someone at rest but the deliberate stillness of someone keeping something contained.

I reach over and take his hand.

He looks at our hands. Then out of the window.

His hand tightens in mine.

We fly into Vienna.

There is no direct flight to Brno, I looked, briefly, before Jan pointed out that this was simply how it worked and had always worked, and that the bus from Vienna takes a little over two hours and is entirely adequate. The bus is, in fact, entirely adequate. We sit at the back and the Austrian countryside gives way to Czech countryside and Jan looks out of the window the way he has been looking out of windows since Amsterdam — interior, private, the face of someone going somewhere that requires preparation.

Brno arrives through the bus window in the late evening — the old city, the weight of Central European architecture that is different from Amsterdam in ways I am trying to read. Heavier. Older. The weight of a place that has been here a long time and has its own grammar. The streets are quieter than I expected, the October evening settling over everything.

Jan is looking at it with an expression I have not seen before. Not nostalgia exactly. Something more complicated. The face of someone looking at a place that formed them and having complicated feelings about both things, the place and the forming.

"It's beautiful," I say.

He looks at me. Something shifts in his face. "Yes," he says. "It is." A pause. "It's also the place I couldn't wait to leave."

I hold his hand.

We don't talk for the rest of the taxi ride.

The hotel is small and good, Jan chose it, which means it is precisely what it needs to be, nothing more. We get in late. Jan is restless in a way he rarely is, checking things, reorganising things that don't need reorganising. I sit on the edge of the bed and watch him and say nothing.

Eventually he stops.

He stands in the middle of the room looking at the floor. Then he looks at me.

"Tomorrow," he says.

"Tomorrow," I say.

He comes to bed. I hold him and he lets me and we lie in the Brno dark and I feel someone I love carrying something they've carried a long time and haven't put down yet.

Eventually his breathing slows. I stay awake a little longer.