The third year arrived quietly, the way years do when you are no longer waiting for something and have begun, instead, to simply be in the middle of it.
Jane noticed it in small things. The way her coat was at the Mayfair apartment as often as at her own flat, a fact she had stopped noting with any particular significance. The way Dimitri had learned, by now, that tea was not optional on Sunday mornings and that she needed at least thirty minutes before she was capable of full sentences, and had arranged his mornings around this without comment. The way she had learned that his silences were not all the same silence — there was the silence of a man thinking through a problem, which was still and vertical, and the silence of a man who wanted company without conversation, which was different, softer, and which she had learned to sit inside without filling.
They were figuring it out. This remained both a description and a project.
"You're learning Russian," Maya observed, over their Sunday coffee. It was not quite an accusation, but it had the texture of one.
"I'm learning a little Russian," Jane said. "For practical reasons."
"What practical reasons?"
"Irina." She paused. "Also, it turns out that being in a room where two people are discussing your welfare in a language you don't speak is significantly less comfortable than being in a room where you understand the relevant nouns."
Maya held her coffee cup. "Has he noticed?"
"He heard me ask Irina to pass the salt last week. He looked at me for a very long moment and didn't say anything, which I'm fairly certain is his version of impressed."
"His version of impressed," Maya repeated. "Which is—"
"The eyebrow," Jane said. "The single one. It went up approximately two millimetres. It was practically a standing ovation."
Maya shook her head. But she was smiling into her cup.
~ * ~
The literary magazine had given Jane a column. It was small — a monthly piece, books and culture and the occasional tangent that her editor called 'pleasantly eccentric' and Jane called 'the actual interesting part' — but it was hers, and she had written the first one on the train back from Bristol and the second on a Tuesday morning in the Mayfair library while Dimitri read opposite her and the city moved outside the window.
She had not written about him. She had written about a library in Russia, which was technically different.
"You wrote about the library," he said, when he read it.
"I wrote about a library. A fictional one."
"With a two-storey ceiling and a rolling ladder and a fireplace large enough to stand in."
"Architectural coincidence," Jane said.
He looked at her. She looked at her tea. There was a long and entirely comfortable silence.
"It was well written," he said eventually.
Jane looked up. In anyone else, this would have been a straightforward compliment. In Dimitri, it was an event.
"Thank you," she said.
He returned to his document. Jane returned to her tea. Outside, London was doing its enormous thing. Inside, it was warm.