They walked. This was not planned; it simply happened because neither of them moved toward their respective cars when they left the restaurant.
London at midnight was its own particular version of itself — quieter, more considered, the neon of the city becoming something almost soft. They walked through Soho and into Covent Garden, which was empty and strangely beautiful, and then along the embankment with the Thames running black beside them.
"I have a seminar at nine tomorrow morning," Jane said.
"I have a meeting at eight."
"We should both go home."
"Yes."
They kept walking.
"Dimitri," she said.
"Hmm."
"I want to be clear about something." She stopped and turned to face him. The river was behind him, and the lights of the far bank, and the city going about its quiet midnight business. "I'm not — I'm not doing this out of some complicated Stockholm syndrome thing. I've thought about that seriously, because I'm a person who thinks seriously about things, and I don't believe that's what this is."
He looked at her. Very steady, very still.
"I think," she said carefully, "that you are a genuinely complicated and sometimes frightening person who did something I will not excuse and who also, in the middle of all of that, was more honest with me than anyone has been in years. And I think I—" She stopped. Started again. "I think I want to find out who you are in a context where no one is kidnapped and everyone is warm and there are no wolves."
"That's a very specific set of criteria," he said.
"I have standards."
The corner of his mouth. The almost-smile she'd been cataloguing for two months.
He reached out and, with the same careful precision he brought to everything, tucked a strand of hair away from her face.
"No kidnapping," he said. "No wolves. Documented consent at all stages."
"Don't push it," she said.
He smiled. A real one — full, unguarded, there for exactly three seconds before his composure reasserted itself. But she had seen it.
She filed it away in the place she kept important things.