Page 102 of Crosswind

"Ours," he says. Quietly. Like he's testing the word.

"The rest goes on Marktplaats," I say, before either of us does anything embarrassing about the word. "The bed frame, the wardrobe, the desk. You'll have it sold by Sunday."

He looks around the apartment. Then he gets out his phone and starts photographing. The desk. The wardrobe. The bed. I watch him do it efficient, unhurried, entirely himself, and I think about this apartment that was never quite a home and I feel something I have a word for.

"Patrick," I say.

"Yeah." Still photographing.

"I'm glad you're coming home."

He stops.

He looks at me. His phone in his hand, the apartment around him, the look of someone who has just heard something land properly.

Then he puts the phone in his pocket and crosses the room and takes my face in both hands and kisses me in the middle of the Czaar Peterstraat apartment that was never really his, and I let him.

"Me too," he says. His voice is not entirely level. "Me too."

Patrick rents a van for the day. He is slightly too pleased about this.

"I got a good one," he says, in the car park. He is standing beside it with the expression of someone who has made an excellent decision and would like this acknowledged.

"It's a transit van."

"It has a very smooth gearbox." He pats the side of it.

"Patrick."

"I'm just saying it was a good choice." He looks at me. Entirely serious.

I look at the van. I look at him.

"Load the sofa," I say.

The sofa requires both of us and considerable renegotiation of how two people carry something around a stairwell corner. The books… four boxes, I maintain this is too many, go in without incident. The grandmother's lamp is wrapped in Patrick's spare duvet and carried with the focused care he brings to things that matter.

He carries the last box himself.

He stands on the pavement outside the building for a moment with the empty box under his arm, looking up at the windows of the apartment that was his for seven months and in which he spent approximately forty nights total.

"Okay?" I say.

"Yeah," he says. He looks at the windows for another moment. Then: "It was never really mine. I think I knew that when I signed the lease." He looks at me. "I was waiting for where I actually wanted to be."

I don't say anything.

He puts the box in the van. "Come on," he says. "Let's go home."

The Marktplaats listings go up that evening. I help him photograph everything properly, good light, accurate descriptions. By Sunday morning the desk has sold. By Sunday afternoon the wardrobe and kitchen things. By Sunday evening most of it is gone — the last piece, the bed frame, goes to a student in the Jordaan who arrives in his own van, which Patrick finds extremely efficient and I find entirely predictable.

"Four hundred and thirty euros," Patrick says, looking at his phone.

"Amsterdam has a good secondhand market," I say.

"I sold my entire apartment," he says. "In two days. For four hundred and thirty euros."

"You sold the contents of your apartment," I say. "The apartment itself was rented."