The restaurant was in Belgravia.
Natasha's choice, which made sense in the way that all of Natasha's choices made sense once you understood the logic underneath them. Neutral ground — not her territory, not theirs, not any space with prior association or advantage. Visible, well-lit, the kind of establishment where scenes were architecturally discouraged by the quality of the tablecloths and the attentiveness of the staff. Public enough to preclude anything that required privacy. Private enough, in its discreet, wood-panelled way, that a conversation of genuine weight could be had without performance.
Jane had thought about what to wear with more care than she usually gave to clothing, and had then caught herself doing it and made herself stop, because the thinking-about-what-to-wear was a form of armour and she had decided, on the taxi ride over, that she was not going to arrive in armour. She was going to arrive as herself. This was, she had found, almost always the most effective strategy, and it was also the only one she could sustain for an entire evening without exhausting herself.
Dimitri sat beside her in the taxi and said very little. This was not unusual — he was not a man who filled pre-event silences with unnecessary speech — but there was a particular quality to his quiet tonight, a slightly different texture, and she let it be what it was without asking. She knew what it was. It was the quiet of a man preparing to sit across a table from someone he loved in a complicated, historical, unresolved way, and attempting to arrive at the table without either the coldness of self-protection or the false warmth of performed reconciliation.
She reached over in the dark of the taxi and put her hand over his, briefly. He turned his hand and held hers for a moment, without comment, and then they arrived.
Natasha was already there.
Of course she was. Natasha would always be already there — it was a fundamental expression of who she was, the person who arrived first, who had assessed the room and chosen her seat and understood the exits before anyone else had descended from the taxi. She was at a corner table, facing the door, in a charcoal suit that managed to be simultaneously severe and elegant, and she looked exactly as she always looked: composed, red-haired, in possession of herself to a degree that most people spent their entire lives attempting and never quite achieving.
She watched them cross the room. Her eyes moved to Jane first — held there for a moment, with the particular, measuring attention Jane had come to recognise as Natasha's version of a greeting — and then to Dimitri.
Something happened in her expression when she looked at him. Something small and fast and almost entirely suppressed, but not quite entirely, not to someone who had been trained by years of reading Dimitri Volkov's microexpressions to notice what people almost hid. It was not guilt, exactly. Not quite relief. Something that lived in the territory between the two — the complicated emotional weather of a person looking at someone they love and seeing, perhaps for the first time in a long time, that the person is all right.
More than all right.
They sat. Natasha ordered wine for the table without asking, which was so precisely what Jane had expected that she felt a flicker of something close to warmth.
"You're well," Natasha said to Dimitri. She said it in the manner of an observation rather than a pleasantry — the tone of a woman reporting a fact she had noted and considered significant.
"Yes," he said.
A pause in which something passed between them that had no words around it — the compressed, specific communication of two people who had known each other since childhood, who had been shaped by the same forces and had diverged at some point into very different things, and who were now sitting across a table trying to find the language for all of it.
Natasha turned to Jane.
"I owe you an apology," she said. Directly, without preamble, in the manner of a woman who had decided on the way here that directness was the only mode worth using. "For the role I played in the events of two years ago. I enabled a situation that placed you in danger. I constructed it with sufficient deniability that I could stand at a distance from the consequences, and I did so deliberately, and it was wrong." She paused. The precision of someone who had rehearsed this, not to make it easier, but to make it accurate. "The fact that I also, at certain points, took steps to mitigate that danger does not cancel the original act. I want to be clear that I know the difference."
Jane listened to this with the full attention it deserved. She held Natasha's gaze — those sharp, watchful eyes that gave very little away and were, she had come to understand, at their most open when they appeared most guarded.
"It doesn't cancel it," Jane said. "No. But it is part of the account. I've never thought of you as simply one thing." She paused, choosing her words with the care she gave to important sentences. "You warned me. In Italy, in the garden — you told me to be careful of you, which is an extraordinary thing to say to someone, and you said it anyway. That's part of the account too."
Natasha looked at her. The measuring look again, but with something different in it now — a slight recalibration, the faint adjustment of someone updating a model they'd built and finding it needed revision.
"You're more pragmatic than I expected," she said.
"I spent six weeks with your cousin," Jane said. "I became extremely pragmatic."
Something happened to Natasha's expression then — a shift so small and so swift that it would have been invisible to anyone not specifically watching for it. The beginning of something that might, in a different context and with more space around it, have become a real smile. It didn't quite arrive. But the territory was there, briefly visible, before the composure reassembled itself.
"He told me you were remarkable," Natasha said. She said it to Jane, but she glanced at Dimitri as she said it — a quick, sidelong look, the look of a person delivering information they know will land. "He used a different word. But that was the meaning."
Jane looked at Dimitri.
He was looking at the table with the expression of a man who had not planned to be the subject of this particular exchange and was finding the experience mildly exposing in a way he was, with visible effort, choosing not to object to.
"Did he," Jane said. Not quite a question.
"He said—" Natasha paused, with the precision of someone translating carefully, "—that you were the most relentlessly honest person he had ever encountered, and that this quality was, in approximately equal measure, deeply aggravating and something he had come to depend on entirely."
A silence settled over the table.
Jane looked at Dimitri. He looked at the tablecloth. The tips of his ears, she noticed, had done something.
"That," Jane said, after a moment, "is the most Dimitri compliment I have ever heard."
And Natasha laughed.
It came suddenly, the way real laughter always did — startled out of the composure, briefly and completely unguarded, and in it Jane heard someone she hadn't met before. Not the strategic Natasha, not the dangerous Natasha, not the carefully constructed public surface of a woman who had built herself into something formidable and largely impenetrable. Someone younger. Someone who had once been a girl who loved her cousin and had told him stories and had made choices, later, that love alone could not entirely explain or excuse.
Someone who was, perhaps, trying to find her way back from those choices.
The laugh faded. Natasha picked up her wine. She looked at Jane across the table with something that was, unmistakably, the beginning of something real.
"I think," she said, "that this is going to be a more interesting evening than I planned for."
"Most evenings are," Jane said, "if you arrive as yourself."
Natasha considered this. Then she raised her glass.
They drank.
Outside, Belgravia conducted its quiet, expensive evening.
Inside, around a corner table in a wood-panelled restaurant, something that had been broken for a long time shifted, almost imperceptibly, in the direction of repair.