Emily arrived at Jane's flat on a Wednesday in October with a rucksack slung over one shoulder, an inappropriate amount of enthusiasm for someone who had taken the six-forty-five from Bristol, and twenty-three questions about Dimitri Volkov.
Jane knew about the questions before Emily had crossed the threshold. She could see them in the particular brightness of her sister's expression — that specific, barely-contained energy of a person who had been storing things up for a significant period of time and was now, finally, in the correct location to deploy them.
"Twenty-three seems like a lot," Jane said, opening the door.
"I've been saving them up." Emily stepped inside without ceremony and looked around the flat with the assessing eye of a twenty-year-old who considered herself a sophisticated judge of living spaces. She turned slowly, taking in the books on every surface, the desk by the window with its organised chaos, the good lamp in the corner that Jane had spent an unreasonable amount of time choosing. She gave a single, decisive nod. "It's good. Very you. Books everywhere. Slightly too much tea paraphernalia."
"There is no such thing as too much tea paraphernalia."
"That," Emily said, dropping her rucksack onto the sofa with the comfortable ease of someone who had been dropping things onto Jane's furniture since she was eleven years old, "is something a person with too much tea paraphernalia would say." She sat down, pulled her knees up, and looked at Jane with the expression that had been making Jane feel simultaneously seen and slightly ambushed since Emily was old enough to deploy it. "So. When do I get to interrogate him?"
"You don't get to interrogate him."
"That's very fair and mature of you." She didn't blink. "When do I get to meet him and form an impression that I will then communicate to Mum and Dad in carefully chosen language?"
Jane looked at her sister. Emily looked back with an expression of absolute, unassailable serenity.
"He's having dinner with us Thursday," Jane said. "And you are to be normal."
"I'm always normal."
"Emily."
"I'm always a version of normal. I can't promise the unedited one. That seems like a set-up for failure on both sides." She tilted her head. "What's he like? And I don't mean what you've told Mum, I mean actually."
Jane sat down in the armchair across from her. She thought about how to answer this — because the question deserved a real answer, not a managed one, and Emily had always been able to tell the difference.
"He's very still," she said finally. "Most people move around themselves a lot — they fill silences, they perform, they take up space in the room with noise. He doesn't. He's just — present. Completely. Like the room has one centre of gravity and he's it, without trying to be." She paused. "It's unsettling at first. Then you realise that when he looks at you, he's actually looking. Not waiting for his turn. Not composing his next sentence. Looking."
Emily was quiet for a moment, which was, in itself, notable.
"That sounds," she said carefully, "either wonderful or terrifying."
"Both," Jane said. "It was both for quite a long time."
Thursday came with the particular low autumn light that made London look like a painting of itself, all amber and grey and the specific melancholy of a city settling into the cold half of the year.
Dimitri arrived at seven-thirty. He brought wine — the correct kind, not showy, not performatively modest, simply right — and Jane had not told him what was correct, which meant he had either asked someone who knew or researched it, and both possibilities were equally him.
He met Emily at the door.
Emily shook his hand, looked up at him — he was, she told Jane afterward in the kitchen, unreasonably tall, honestly Jane, it's a lot — and said, without apparent premeditation: "You look exactly like I expected."
Dimitri looked at her. "Do I."
It was not quite a question. It had the texture of a man filing information.
"Yes. Jane described you very accurately." Emily held his gaze with the easy confidence of a person who had grown up with an older sister and had therefore never learned to be intimidated by anyone older or more serious than herself. "She didn't mean to. It came out over three separate phone calls."
Jane pressed her eyes briefly closed.
There was a pause — the precise, weighted kind that Dimitri used when he was deciding something. And then something happened to his expression. Not a smile, not yet, but the territory adjacent to one: a slight easing at the corner of his mouth, something warming almost imperceptibly in the grey eyes. The look he got when something had surprised him in a way he found he didn't mind.
He looked at Jane. The expression — the real one, the one without armour — crossed his face for just a moment, clear as a signal.
"That," he said, and there was something in his voice that Jane recognised as the closest he got to warmth in the first thirty minutes of anything, "is very good information."
Dinner was, in the event, not the careful and slightly formal occasion Jane had half-braced for. Emily had no patience for careful and slightly formal. She asked Dimitri questions about Moscow with the direct curiosity of someone who considered the world an interesting place and other people the most interesting part of it. He answered with more detail than Jane expected — she watched him recalibrate, somewhere around the second question, from the guarded register he brought to most conversations about his life to something more open, something that recognised Emily's curiosity as genuine rather than tactical and responded accordingly.
They talked about cities. About architecture, which turned out to be something Emily knew more about than Jane had realised, and something Dimitri had strong opinions on, which shouldn't have surprised her and did. They disagreed about Moscow's relationship with its own history, and Emily held her ground with the easy confidence of someone arguing a position she actually believed, and Dimitri held his with the precision of a man who had thought about it for thirty years, and Jane sat between them and felt something warm and complicated expand in her chest.
This, she thought. This is what it looks like when the pieces of a life fit.
Afterward, while Dimitri was in the living room and Jane and Emily were making coffee in the kitchen with the door half-closed — the ancient, reliable sanctuary of sisters in kitchens — Emily leaned against the counter and looked at Jane with an expression that had, for once, nothing performative in it at all.
"He looks at you," she said, "like you're the only thing in the room that's real."
Jane said nothing. She poured the coffee.
"It's a bit intense," Emily continued. "In the best way. The kind of intense that means it's actual." She paused. "I've seen people look at each other in all sorts of ways. Boys at uni who think they're in love and are mostly just keen. Dad looks at Mum like she's reliable, which is its own kind of love but it's a different thing." She picked up her mug. "Dimitri looks at you like you solved something he didn't know he was trying to work out."
Jane looked at her sister. Emily, who was twenty years old and had apparently been paying very close attention to the world.
"When did you get so perceptive?" Jane said.
"I've always been perceptive," Emily said, with great dignity. "You've all just been too distracted to notice." She sipped her coffee. "I approve of him, for the record. Officially. You can tell him if you want."
"I won't be telling him that."
"He'll figure it out anyway," Emily said. "He seems like the type."
Jane thought about a man who had catalogued her expressions across a crowded charity gala, who had noticed when she thought in italics, who had called Anton and said call Jane first before delivering news she needed time to sit with.
"Yes," she said. "He is, rather."
They carried the coffee through. Outside, London was doing its cold October thing. Inside the flat, around the small table with the books on every surface and the good lamp in the corner, it was warm.