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I stop.

He is looking at me with the expression. The full warm undone version, the one that arrived on a Thursday evening in a hallway and hasn't left.

"Yes," he says.

Then he gets up from the sofa.

He picks me up.

I am aware that this is happening Patrick lifting me off my feet with the complete commitment of someone who has made a decision, and I have a brief moment of considering whether to object before deciding that objecting would be disproportionate.

"Patrick," I say. From approximately thirty centimetres above where I was.

"You said it," he says. He is grinning the full version, the one that takes over his entire face. "You actually said it."

"I did," I say. "You can put me down."

"In a minute." He spins. Once. In my sitting room.

"Patrick."

"I've been waiting since end of August," he says. Still spinning, slightly.

"I can tell," I say.

"You said it." He puts me down. Both hands on my face immediately and kisses me properly, thoroughly, in the middle of the sitting room, and I let him because this is, it turns out, simply what happens when Jan Novak asks Patrick Sutton to move in.

When he pulls back he is still grinning.

"You're impossible," I say.

"I'm moving in," he says. "Those are different things."

I look at the ceiling. Then at him. He is standing in the middle of my…our sitting room looking like someone who has just been given exactly what he wanted.

"I know you would have waited longer," I say.

"As long as it took," he says. "It had to be you."

"I could have said it sooner," I say.

"Yes," he says. "But you said it now."

I look at him.

"Yes," I say. "I did."

I sit back down. Patrick sits beside me. The sitting-beside, the one that is simply the arrangement of two people who have decided this is where they belong.

"Technicalities," I say.

He looks at me.

"We need to go over what you want to bring," I say. "From the apartment. I can make room for anything. The wardrobe, the sitting room, the study… wherever you need space, we make space."

He looks around the apartment. The look of someone considering something they have been considering for months, except now the considering is real.

"I don't need much," he says. "I love this apartment. I've loved it since the first time I was here." He pauses. "Your sofa is better than mine. Your kitchen is better than mine. Your bed is… we’re keeping your bed."