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“I’m not arguing with you about the knives,” I say. “What do you cook?”

“Anything,” he says. “Pelmeni. Borscht. I spent three weeks learning Italian pasta once.” He stops. “For a woman. She left before I finished learning.”

“Did the pasta survive her departure?” I ask.

“The pasta was excellent,” he says.

“So you got the better end of it,” I say.

“Da,” he says, and his mouth curves. A flush runs from my chest up to my collarbone that I’m attributing entirely to the cold air going away.

“Your turn,” he says.

“I’d have a dog,” I say.

He blinks.

“My father was allergic,” I say. “Twenty-six years, no dog. Then law school, no dog. Then your house, still no dog.” I pull my coat tighter. “I want a golden retriever. Very fluffy, completely pointless. I’d call her Goldy.”

“Goldy,” he says.

“Outstanding name.”

“Terrible name,” he says.

“I have a law degree,” I say. “I’m qualified to assess names. Goldy is excellent, and she’d sleep on the bed and ruin the furniture, and I’d be entirely fine with both.”

He’s quiet for a second, eyes on me across the dark water. “You went to Columbia Law,” he says, “to name a dog Goldy.”

“Columbia Law was so I could afford Goldy’s veterinary bills,” I say.

He laughs, and I feel it land in the center of my chest, spreading outward into my arms, and then I’m laughing too. For a few seconds I’m just a person on a boat laughing about a dog’s name with a man who is thoroughly impossible.

He goes quiet first. I go quiet after. When I look up, he’s watching me, and there’s nothing behind it I can pick apart. No agenda, no angle. Just him looking at me like I’m the only thing on the water worth looking at, and I’ve been in enough rooms with him to know that’s not something he hands out freely.

My face goes warm. I look at the skyline.

“Cook for me,” I say, before I’ve decided to say it.

“When?”

“Tonight,” I say. “Or tomorrow. Or this week.”

He holds my gaze, then nods. “Okay,” he says. “I will.

The boat rocks between us. His knee is a foot from mine, and my pulse is in my throat. Five weeks in his house, some of them in his bed. I know his hands, his voice, and the exact weight of his arm across my waist. And somehow it’s pasta that outlasted a woman and a dog I haven’t got yet that makes me feel like I actually know him.

“Tell me something true,” I say. “Nothing to do with any of it.”

He thinks. “I wake up at five every morning,” he says. “Have since I was a kid. Three hours before anyone else is up.” He stops. “You sleep through it. I’ve checked.”

“What do you do so early?” I ask.

“Cook,” he says. “Read. Exercise. Thinking through problems.” He sighs. “Lavro would come down around five-thirty and swear at me for being awake. Every morning. Like I was doing it to him on purpose.”

I picture it. A kitchen before dawn, two brothers, one furious about the hour. My throat tightens briefly, and I swallow it back.

“Your turn,” he says.