Page 109 of Crosswind

This is Jan's idea, though he frames it as a practical suggestion, the weather is good and the Jordaan is worth walking in November. Peter, who has been to Amsterdam many times, goes along with this without comment, which I suspect is his way of letting Jan show him something. We walk for two hours. Jan points at things with the authority of someone who has thought about a city carefully and has opinions about which parts of it are worth a person's time. Peter listens. I watch the two of them in conversation and feel something I don't immediately have a name for.

At some point Peter falls slightly behind to take a photograph and Jan is beside me and I say, quietly: "Well?"

"Well what," he says.

"What do you think of him."

He is quiet for a moment. "He worries about you," Jan says. "In the way of someone who has been doing it for a long time and has recently decided it might be unnecessary." A pause. "I like him."

"He likes you," I say. "A lot, I think. He's not easy to impress."

"I know," Jan says. "He's been less subtle about it than he thinks."

I look at Peter, who is photographing a canal with the focused attention of someone who has definitely not been listening to us.

"He thinks he's being very neutral," I say.

"He's not," Jan says. Simply.

I look at Jan — at his profile, the November light on him, Jan walking through a city he has made his own. I feel something so uncomplicated and large that I reach over and take his hand.

He looks down at our hands. Then at me.

"What," he says.

"Nothing," I say. "Just glad you're here."

He looks at me for a moment. Then he squeezes my hand once and walks on, still holding it.

Behind us Peter takes another photograph. Of us, I think. I don't mind at all.

Saturday evening, after dinner, Peter and Jan end up on the sofa with Jan's laptop open between them, something about Norwegian pension fund regulations that Jan finds genuinely interesting and Peter finds someone who finds it genuinely interesting. I sit in the armchair across from them and watch this happen and think about all the versions of my life that would not have led here — to this sofa, this apartment, this man beside my brother, this Saturday evening in November, and feel the weight of how precisely everything had to go wrong and then right to arrive at this exact point.

I don't say any of this out loud.

I just sit in the armchair and watch Jan explain something to my brother with the focused patience he brings to things he wants someone to understand, and I feel it.

We go to bed late.

Peter takes the spare room — Jan's office, which has a sofa bed that Jan had made up before Peter arrived, duvet and pillow already in place. Jan is efficient about these things in a way that I find, still, quietly extraordinary.

In the bedroom Jan sits on the edge of the bed and I lie on my stomach and he starts, without being asked, to scratch my back. Slow and unhurried, the way he does it, like he has decided this is what the moment requires and is simply providing it.

"You're happy," he says. Quietly. Not a question.

"Yes," I say. Into the pillow.

"Peter is good," he says.

"I told you he was."

"You did," he says. His hand keeps moving. "He loves you. It's very visible."

I turn my head slightly. "So do you," I say.

He is quiet for a moment. "Yes," he says. "I do."

He keeps scratching my back until I am almost asleep, and then he lies down, not on his side, the way he usually does. He wraps his arm around me from behind, his face between my shoulder blades, his arm across my back. The weight of him. The warmth.