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“I felt it.”

“I know. So did I.”

“I felt you. “ His fingers were in my hair. His voice broke. “You were so scared. You were so scared for so long. And you never said. Oh, Maksim.”

“I am not scared now.”

“Good.”

“I have not been so unafraid since I was a boy.”

He was crying, and so was I. We rocked each other, gently, in the sun, in a bed in a strange house, with the tulip drooping in its glass. I felt his pulse against my chest. I felt mine, faint but real, answering. I laid my cheek against the top of his head and closed my eyes and thought, for the first time in eleven hundred years:

I am home.

From far away, down the long polished halls, came the sound of the front door opening.

“Alexander?” said a familiar voice, sharply. “Alexander Pendleton, why on earth is there a tulip missing from the hall table?”

Lex went rigid.

We stared at each other, wide-eyed, wrecked, naked, glorious.

“Oh, no,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” I agreed.

“She’s back early.”

“She has an excellent sense of timing.”

“I’m going to die.”

“You will not die. You will put on your trousers.” I kissed him, swiftly, on the mouth. “And I will go and speak to your father.”

Chapter 33

LEX

Breakfast

There are three moments in a man’s life when he should not be caught wearing his trousers inside out.

One is a job interview. One is a funeral. And the third, I now know from experience, is when your mother is standing at the bottom of the stairs with a stolen tulip in her hand and an expression like a thundercloud, and your father is behind her in a charcoal suit, and your sister is peering out from behind the banister with her fist stuffed in her mouth.

“Alexander,” said my mother.

“Morning.”

“It is a quarter past ten.”

“Yeah, I— I overslept.”

“You are wearing your sweatpants on your head.”

“It’s a hat.”

“Mm.” She lifted the tulip and examined it. “This was in the front hall. This was in a vase. This has been, I see, in a jelly glass. Under the bed. Beside a tray.”