SLEEP

The Draycott Agreement had nineteen pages, twelve clauses, two schedules, and a safe word. It did not contain the word overnight.

Win had checked. She had checked on the drive back from Montauk, in the back of the Mercedes with the contract open on her knee and Anselmo's eyes carefully on the road, and again in the apartment on Fifth Avenue, in the bath, with a pencil. She had read all nineteen pages in the steam. There was a clause on frequency. There was a clause on venue. There was a long tedious paragraph on the rights of third-party observers. But nowhere, in any schedule, under any heading, did the document say whether a guest might fall asleep in the host's arms, or what was to be done about the morning.

It was, she thought, a significant omission. It was exactly the sort of loophole she'd have charged a client a thousand dollars to close.

On the third day after Montauk, at six in the evening, a card arrived.

It was not black. It was ordinary white stock, the sort sold in boxes of fifty, and it had no gold edge and no silver ink. It said, in a quick slanting hand she had seen once at the foot of a contract:

No game. Dinner, if you will. 14 East 74th. Eight o'clock. —C.

She read it standing in the hall. Then she took it into the library and sat on the arm of a chair and read it again, trying to detect a trap.

There was none. That was the trap.

…

Number Fourteen East Seventy-Fourth Street was a narrow limestone townhouse, five stories tall, wedged between a Swiss consulate and a dentist. It had a black door with a brass knocker in the shape of a hand. Win rang the bell, stepped back, and found that she was, absurdly, holding her breath.

The door opened.

He was in shirtsleeves. He had rolled them to the elbow. There was a tea towel over his shoulder, and a smear of something yellow on his cuff, and a look on his face of a man who has been caught reading someone else's mail.

"You're early," said Callum.

"It's two minutes to eight."

"I'd planned to be finished."

"Finished with what?"

"Dinner."

He stepped aside. She went in. It was a dim, narrow hall paneled in pale wood, with a staircase curving up into shadow, and the air was warm and smelled, to her profound astonishment, of burnt butter.

"Are you cooking?" said Win.

"I'm attempting to."

"You don't cook."

"I've been told I don't."

"By whom?"

"By the kitchen," said Callum, grimly, and led the way.

It was a very large kitchen and an extremely clean one. It had never, she thought, been used. Every surface was marble or steel; every pot hung unscathed on its hook. In the center of the island, on a copper pan the size of a hubcap, sat a pale, pitiful, collapsing yellow mass that was, by the evidence of a dozen eggshells in the sink, an omelet.

She looked at it.

"I've never made one," he said.

"I can tell."

"I looked it up."

"Where?"

"The internet. There was a man in a hat." He set his jaw. "He made it look straightforward."

Win put her bag down on the counter. She took off her coat. She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, and washed her hands at the big steel sink, and dried them on the end of the tea towel on his shoulder, which brought her very near to his chin.

"Move," she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You're standing in front of the stove. Move."

He moved.

She poured the ruined eggs into the sink, wiped the pan, and set it on the flame. She found butter. She found, in a drawer so spotless it looked staged, a whisk. She broke four eggs into a bowl one-handed, and he made a small involuntary sound of respect, and she said, without looking up, "I spent two years in a studio with a boy who made me breakfast every day and never once looked at me. I learned out of spite."

"Keaton."

It was the first time he had said the name. She stopped whisking. "How do you know about Keaton?"

"Margaux's report. It was a financial summary." He looked, for the first time, uncertain. "There was a line. 'Fiancé, K. Pruitt, 32. Relationship terminated.' I didn't read further."

"Not further?"

"I didn't ask. Clause eleven."

"You're very good at not asking."

"I'm told I'm improving."

She laughed. She poured the eggs into the pan and tipped it, the way her mother had taught her, so that the edges lifted and curled. The butter hissed. She sprinkled salt. She turned the heat down and covered the pan with a plate, and they stood side by side in the warm bright steam of the kitchen without speaking.

"It should be about ninety seconds," said Win. "Don't touch it."

"I won't."

"You want to."

"I want to very much."

"That's character. Hold on to it."

He folded his arms. He stood watching the pan with fierce attention, like a man defusing a bomb, and she looked at the line of his jaw in the light, and the tea towel, and the smear of yellow on his cuff, and a feeling came over her that was so unexpected and so entire that she had to look away.

It was something like peace.

She had not known it was still available.

…

They ate at the kitchen island, on stools, with a bottle of white Burgundy between them and a green salad dressed with lemon. The omelet was not good. It was a little brown at one edge, and she had over-salted it. Callum ate his in silence, to the end, with the dutiful ferocity of a man finishing a task, and then put down his fork and said:

"That was the best thing I've ever eaten."

"It was a mediocre omelet."

"It was yours."

"It was a Tuesday omelet. It's what you make when you don't have anything in the fridge." She topped up his glass. "What's in your fridge?"

"Coffee."

"What else?"

"Margaux orders things. They appear."

"Do you ever eat them?"

"Not often." He studied the stem of the glass. "I find that I forget."

"You forget to eat."

"I forget a number of things."

"Such as?"

"Such as—" He stopped. Something moved across his face, quick as a bird's shadow across water. "Such as sleep. I told you. I don't."

"At all?"

"Three hours. Four. It varies."

"Since when?"

He looked at her. His eyes in the low light were nearly black.

"Clause eleven," he said.

"You can't use that every time."

"I use it constantly."

"It's a loophole."

"It's a wall," said Callum, "and I'm aware of it." He pushed the plate away. "I'd like to say something that isn't on the other side of it, if I may."

"Please."

"I'd like you to stay."

She sat very still.

"Tonight," he added, quickly. "Here. Not as a game. I realize there's nothing in the contract about it. I've checked. I looked at all nineteen pages, and the word overnight is not mentioned. It seemed to me a defect."

"I noticed that too."

"You did?"

"I checked it in the bath."

"Did you?" Something happened at the corner of his mouth, a flicker of astonished amusement that he tried and failed to suppress. "Then we've both been reading the same document in separate rooms."

"It happens in good marriages," said Win, and wished, instantly, that she hadn't.

He didn't remark on it. He only looked at her, a long, level, warm look, with the knuckle of his thumb resting against his lower lip. The kitchen was very quiet. Somewhere in the walls a pipe ticked, and settled.

"Yes," said Win. "All right."

"Yes?"

"I'll stay."

…

His bedroom was on the top floor, under a skylight.

She had expected black. She'd expected a bed like a coffin, silk sheets, a mirror on the ceiling. Instead it was a long plain white room with a bare oak floor and a single window, and a bed so low and wide and unadorned that it looked like a piece of landscape. There was a lamp. There was a chair with a gray sweater over its back. On the night table, face up, lay the silver watch.

"It's not what you thought," said Callum.

"No."

"I haven't brought anyone here."

"Not anyone?"

"Not in eleven years." He stood in the doorway with his hands at his sides, and the look on his face was the one he'd worn on the beach: wary, bare, a little stunned. "The Gilded Hour is at Halcyon. The Tower is for business. This is just the place where I—"

"Don't sleep."

"Where I lie down."

She crossed to him. She put her palm flat on the front of his shirt, over the heart, and felt it going: quick, uneven, absurdly young. She said, "May I take this off?"

"What?"

"The shirt."

"That is a matter," said Callum, in a voice not entirely steady, "on which I have no policy."

"Then I'll make one."

She undid the first button.

It was slower than she'd expected. She had thought, in the car, that there would be some fierceness in it; some speed, some efficiency, the familiar instruments of the game. But there was no game. The room was full of the soft gray light of the city coming through the skylight, and the quiet, and the sound of his breathing, and her own hands trembling very slightly at the third button, which would not come. He stood perfectly still beneath them. He did not help. When she looked up at his face, his eyes were closed.

"Callum."

"Yes."

"Look at me."

He opened them.

"I don't want to beg," he said. His voice was rough. "That's the thing. I had it planned. I thought I'd make you say it. It was how it was always done. I thought—" He broke off. "I wanted you to ask."

"I know."

"And I find that I'm the one who—"

"I know."

"I don't have a word for it."

"Then don't use one." She slipped the shirt from his shoulders. In the light from the skylight the scar on his arm was long and pale as a seam in marble, and she bent and put her mouth to it, once, and heard the breath leave him as if it had been pulled. "Say my name."

"Win."

"Again."

"Win."

It was the third time he had said it. It was the first time she heard it. It came out of him like something let loose, a low unguarded groan with the whole of a month in it, and he caught her face in both hands and kissed her; and then, for a long time, there was no more conversation.

…

What followed was not a game.

She would think about it afterward, on the long cold nights, and be unable to find the line. It was slow. It was serious. It was almost solemn, like a thing done in a church, and yet shot through with a ridiculous, helpless, delighted tenderness that kept breaking the solemnity apart; so that once, in the middle of it, he said her name into the hollow of her throat in a voice of such baffled gratitude that she laughed, and he laughed, and for a moment they lay there shaking in each other's arms like children caught in the dark.

She remembered the lamp, and then the lack of it. She remembered the long cool slide of the sheets. She remembered his hands, which she had thought of as instruments, and which proved instead to be uncertain, and kind, and greedy, and which kept pausing, at the edge of her ribs, with a little hitch of care that she pretended not to notice. She remembered thinking, Don't be careful. I'm not made of glass. And then, quite suddenly, Oh. Yes I am.

She remembered the moment the thinking stopped.

And she remembered afterward, in the dark, with her cheek on his chest and the great slow drum of his heart under her ear, the sense of having arrived somewhere. It was a stupid, sentimental, unprofessional feeling. An adjuster knew better. An adjuster knew that every policy had an exclusion, and that the exclusion was always on page nineteen.

But she lay there with her eyes open, in the white room under the skylight, and for the length of an hour she did not count anything at all.

…

She woke at dawn.

She didn't know what had woken her. The room was pale and still. A thin gray light filled the skylight, and the first bar of sun was laid across the bare oak floor like a plank. She lay on her side, under a quilt she didn't remember, with one arm flung over the empty pillow.

Not empty. He was awake.

He was lying on his back with his hands behind his head, not moving, staring up at the glass. He had been lying like that, she thought, for some time. There was a stillness about him that did not belong to sleep: the stillness of a man who has been keeping watch.

She turned her head. He had already turned his.

"Good morning," said Callum.

"How long have you been awake?"

"I haven't been asleep."

"Callum."

"I slept for an hour," he said, "around three. It was the longest in eleven years. I woke up and you were here and for a moment I thought it was a mistake." A faint, odd smile. "Then you turned over and said something."

"What did I say?"

"You said, 'Net, zero.'"

She went hot to the roots of her hair.

"It's a thing I say in my sleep. It's from work. A claim is zero-net when the loss is exactly offset by the payment." She sat up, pulling the quilt round her. "It means everything balances. It doesn't mean anything."

"It sounded as though it meant something."

"It meant I was dreaming about a spreadsheet."

"Was it a good spreadsheet?"

"The best," said Win, and let herself fall back against the pillow, and laughed. He rolled onto his side to face her, and the light came across his face, and for the first time since the night in the ballroom she saw him as he must have been at nineteen: a lean, tousled, sleepless boy, with a crooked mouth and gray eyes and the first faint lines of a life.

It frightened her more than anything had since the biopsy.

She was getting used to this. It was the thing she had not accounted for. Not the pain, not the death, not the contract, but this: the quiet ordinary appalling fact that she was beginning to like waking up beside someone, and that the someone knew how to hold the shape of the morning without breaking it.

Ten, she thought. Nine.

"Win."

"Yes?"

"I'd like to make you breakfast."

"God, no."

"I'd like to try."

"Callum, you can't boil water."

"I can learn."

"It will take you the rest of the winter."

"Then it'll take me the rest of the winter," said Callum, and the words lay in the sun-striped air between them, innocent and enormous. He seemed to hear them a second after she did. A shadow crossed his face. He began to say something, and stopped.

"It's all right," said Win. She laid two fingers across his mouth. "I know what you meant. I know it's ninety days."

"Do you?"

"I read the contract."

"I'd like to renegotiate."

"Not yet."

"When?"

"When I'm properly awake," said Win, "and have had coffee, and you've burned the eggs."

He kissed her fingertips. Then he got up and went downstairs in his bare feet, and she heard, a minute later, the crash of a pan, an oath, and a long, wholly un-Draycott-like silence in which a man was evidently reading the instructions off a carton.

She lay in the empty bed and looked at the skylight.

The ledger was in her bag, down in the hall. She could have got up and fetched it. She did not. She lay and listened to the smell of burning butter climb the stairs, and she thought for a long while about the number thirty-one, which was how many entries she had written since September, and about the first of them, which said Cost: Unknown, and about all the others.

Later, when he was occupied with the toaster, she slipped down to the hall in her bare feet and took out the Montblanc and wrote it standing up, on the lid of a radiator, with the journal braced on her knee.

Entry #31: Not a game.

She looked at it. It sat on the page in her own upright black hand, inarguable and absurd. She frowned. She tapped the nib against her teeth.

Then, deliberately, she struck out the word Not, and wrote in above it, in smaller letters:

Not only a game.

It was, she thought, a more accurate line. It left room for the exclusion. She capped the pen, tucked the ledger under her arm, and went into the kitchen, where a man in a ruined shirt looked up from a pan of smoking eggs with an expression of such guilty and radiant hope that she almost forgot to be afraid.