He asked her in the library.
Not his library — though they had been back to Russia twice since Italy, and it had been different both times. Warmer, in ways that had nothing to do with the weather, which had been exactly as cold as it always was. The estate itself had felt different — less like a place she was being kept and more like a place she was choosing to visit, which was a distinction that turned out to matter enormously. Irina had made the soup both times. The wolves had been audible in the distant dark, which Jane had found she didn't mind as much as she once had.
Not his library. Hers.
The university library, specifically — the section on Victorian fiction on the third floor, the corner she had claimed in her first year because it had the best light and the chair that didn't squeak and the particular quality of quiet that came from being in a part of the stacks that most people had no reason to visit. She had been spending Tuesday mornings there for three years. It was, in every meaningful sense, her place.
He simply appeared.
This was very like him. She had stopped being surprised by his ability to materialise in places without apparent announcement — had accepted it as one of his qualities, like the precision and the silences and the way he held things too hard. He sat down across from her reading table without preamble, without greeting, with the directness of a man who had decided what he was going to do and was doing it.
He placed something on the table between her open books.
A key.
Jane looked at it. It was a substantial key — heavy, old-fashioned in its weight if not its cut, the kind that came with a serious door. She looked at it for a moment and then looked at him.
"This is the key to the Mayfair apartment," he said. His voice was even. Controlled in the way it was when he was saying something that mattered and had decided that the most honest delivery was the plainest one. "The actual one. Not a safe house. Not a temporary arrangement." He paused. "I am not asking you to move in. I want to be clear about that — I am not asking you to change your life or your arrangements or give up anything you have." He stopped, reassembled, with the slight visible effort of a man working at the edge of his vocabulary for a particular kind of thing. "I am telling you that if you want to be there, you should be able to come and go as you choose, without — without my schedule or my permission or my awareness being required. It should be yours to use as you decide."
Jane looked at the key sitting between her copy of Middlemarch and her annotated edition of Villette. She thought about the difference between an invitation and a concession. She thought about how long it must have taken him to get here — not to the library, but to this, to a version of himself that could place a key on a table and say without conditions that it was hers to use as she decided.
She understood, from knowing him as well as she did by now, that this was both an invitation and a concession. That it had cost something. That he had chosen to spend that cost anyway.
"You're giving me a key," she said.
"Yes."
"Of your own free will."
"Yes." A pause that contained something she recognised as the particular difficulty of a man examining his own motivations honestly. "I'm aware that that's a baseline, not a merit. I'm working on the difference."
She looked at him for a moment. The library was quiet around them — the distant sound of pages turning, someone's keyboard, the particular hush of a room full of people absorbed in other worlds. Ordinary Tuesday morning sounds. The sounds of her life, the one she had built and maintained and come back to.
She picked up the key. It was heavier than she'd expected, which was very like his keys, which were always heavier than necessary, as though the weight was part of the point.
"I'll stay Tuesday nights," she said. "And sometimes Saturdays." She turned the key over in her hand, feeling the weight of it. "But I'm keeping my flat."
"Obviously," he said.
"It's not obvious to everyone."
"It's obvious to me," he said. "Your flat is yours. I wouldn't ask you to give it up."
She looked at him. He looked back steadily, with the patient, open attention of a man who had nothing to hide in this particular moment.
"And you don't get a key to mine," she said, "until I decide you get a key to mine."
"Of course," he said.
"And you are going to have Indian takeaway on my sofa at least twice more before the year is out. Non-negotiable."
He looked at her with the look — the one that lived in the space between his usual expression and something much warmer, the one she had first seen on an Italian terrace and had been collecting, quietly and privately, ever since.
"That seems reasonable," he said.
She pocketed the key. She could feel the weight of it against her hip as she settled it into her pocket — solid and real and present in the way of things that had actually happened.
She went back to her book. Middlemarch, page two hundred and fourteen, a passage about the nature of unhistoric acts and the people who performed them.
Under the table, at some point in the next few minutes, his foot came to rest next to hers. Neither of them moved. Neither of them mentioned it. The library continued its quiet business around them, entirely indifferent and entirely perfect.
Jane read her page. She did not retain a single word of it.
She was smiling too much to concentrate.