She became aware of the light first, then of him watching her.
He was on his side, not pretending, not reaching for his phone. Just there. The gray coming through the curtains made his face look patient in a way she hadn't noticed the night before.
She didn't move. Neither did he.
The radiator ticked somewhere below them. She thought about how she would describe this to herself later — in the car, probably, with the radio off — and found she didn't have the words. The shape of it was wrong for words.
"Hi," she said finally. "Hi." That was all, for a while.
She could see the window from where she lay. The sky was doing the thing it does at this hour, the dark going soft and undecided at the edges. There was a plant on the sill she hadn't noticed the night before. It looked tended.
"You kept it alive," she said. He glanced toward it. "Mostly," he said.
She turned back to him. She thought about the word mostly. How much weight a word like that could hold.
"I should—" she started. "Yeah," he said. But she didn't move, and he didn't ask her to, and the light kept shifting, doing what it does, making everything it touched seem briefly worth staying for.
When she finally sat up, she did it slowly. She found her things without turning on a lamp.
At the door she paused, her hand on the frame, not looking back. "The plant has a name," he said, from somewhere in the dark. "I don't know why I'm telling you that."
She smiled at the door. "I know," she said. "Me neither."