Page 87 of Crosswind

"I know."

"And you're telling me you're not changing."

"I meant what I said this morning. I'm not changing. I'm growing." I meet his eyes in the mirror. "I love you unreservedly, and I want you to know that."

He looks at me in the mirror for a long moment.

"I love you too. Unreservedly." He kisses my neck from behind, briefly, warm. "Let's go."

The drinks are in a bar in De Pijp — low light, good music at a volume that allows conversation, the kind of place that knows what it is. My colleagues arrive in pairs and threes, people I have worked with for years and never seen outside of a conference room.

The first thing Sofia from legal says when she sees me is: "Jan Novak. You actually came."

"I said I would come."

"You've said that for eight months," she says. Then she looks at Patrick beside me and back at me. "Ah," she says. "Now I understand the improvement in your general demeanour."

"This is Patrick," I say.

Patrick shakes her hand. Sofia looks at him for a moment with the expression of someone conducting a rapid assessment. Then she turns to me: "Of course you waited until you had a reason to show up that would make the rest of us feel terrible about our life choices."

"I don't know what you mean," I say.

"Jan." She gestures at Patrick. "Look at him."

Patrick has the expression of someone trying very hard not to look pleased with himself.

"He's a pilot," I say, as if this is the relevant information.

"Of course he is," Sofia says. She looks at Patrick again. "Do you have a brother?"

"I have one brother," Patrick says. "He lives in Bergen."

"Norway Bergen or New Jersey Bergen."

"Norway."

"Shame," Sofia says, and goes to get a drink.

Martijn from risk management appears beside me. "She's not wrong," he says. "We've been trying to get you to come for almost a year." He looks at Patrick. "Nice to meet you." Then, to me: "You look different."

"I'm fine," I say.

"Happy," he says. "That's the word." He seems to find this both correct and slightly surprising. "Good." And he goes to defend his Indonesian restaurant opinion to someone else.

Patrick is… Patrick. He finds the room within ten minutes, finds the conversations, asks the right questions, laughs at the right moments. He does not try to impress anyone. He simply arrives and is himself and that, I have come to understand, is all it takes.

At some point he is talking to Kirsten from my team about something… aviation, I think, she has a relative who is a pilot, and I am talking to Martijn about Indonesian food, and I look across the room at Patrick and he looks across the room at me at the exact same moment.

He raises his glass slightly.

I raise mine.

We go back to our conversations.

This is, I find, exactly what I wanted. Not to be in the same conversation. To be in the same room, the same evening, the same life — each of us doing our own thing and knowing the other is there.

Patrick notices things. On the walk home he takes my hand and says: "That was what you wanted, wasn't it?"