The rest of the house had gone dark an hour ago, room by room, until only the glasshouse at the end of the lawn still held any light — one lamp, low and yellow, and the two of them who hadn't yet found a reason to leave it.
She told herself she'd come out for the air. He told himself he'd come to check on his aunt's orchids, which needed no checking and had been mentioned by no one but him.
The glass had fogged from the inside, the garden beyond it gone soft and unwitnessed, and somewhere above them a leaf let go of the water it had been holding all evening.
"You should go in," she said, not moving, one strap of her dress slipped to the top of her arm and staying there.
"I know," he said, and crossed to the bench across from hers instead, close enough that the space between them became the only thing left in the room.
Neither of them had said a name yet — not his, not hers, not the thing this evening had quietly turned into — and the not-saying had a weight of its own, thick as the wet green air.
Her strap had been sliding for an hour. She'd stopped catching it three plants back and left it exactly where it had fallen, waiting to see who would say something first.
He noticed. He didn't say so. He reached over and set it right with one finger, slow enough that setting it right and leaving it fallen would have taken the same amount of time.
"That wasn't fixing it," she said.
"No," he agreed, and let his hand stay at her shoulder instead of returning to his own lap.
Outside, a sprinkler ticked on somewhere far off in the dark, the only sound in a house that had gone entirely to sleep around the two people still awake inside it.
This was the overture, she understood now — not what came after, but this: the six inches, his hand, the choosing not to look away. When he finally closed the last of the distance, neither of them so much as blinked.