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I could cry, and I don’t.

His name is in my mouth. I nearly say it.

I put my hands over my own mouth instead. Both hands.

He touches my wrists. “Do not hide your mouth from me.”

I could say his name now. Instead I take my hands away and kiss him, hard enough that he has to catch my elbows, and he makes the small broken sound that always makes me want more of him.

His coat goes on the chair. We get out of the rest of it badly, both caught in cloth at once, and then there is nothing between us but the cold of him, and I pull him down to me.

I say yes, and there, and please.

Tonight I cannot stop. When he changes what he is doing I say don’t change that, and he doesn’t. He says one word into my hair that I do not know.

I come with my voice loose in the room and his name right behind my teeth, and I do not say it.

Afterward, quiet. Then not quiet, because it is me.

“Corentin taught me the room-note before he let me touch a crucible,” I say, into his chest. “I was eleven. He stood me in the middle of the workshop and told me to shut up for a hundred counts and tell him what the building was saying.”

“What was it saying?”

“B flat, and a crack in the north wall. He hadn’t known about the crack. He went and looked, and came back, and gave me a mallet of my own.” I have to stop. He waits. “I miss him. I’m frightened for him every hour I’m awake.”

He is very still under me. His hand closes over mine on his chest and keeps it there.

“I know,” he says.

“That was a true thing. You owe me one back.”

His thumb moves across my knuckles. “I am glad you are here. I have not been glad of much.”

“That’ll do.”

“Go to sleep, Enora.”

And he says it in the dark, in that voice, with the mask on the chest by the door, and I lie on him with my eyes open and my whole body loose and ruined, and I think it clearly, in whole words, after a week of not letting myself finish the thought:

Twenty days. And then what, exactly?

I don’t sleep for a long time. He does, for an hour, which I count, because I count everything.

In Morlac I got up and left him asleep on a table. Tonight I lie on him and let him.

The next night I do it differently.

I have had all day to think about it. I thought about it at breakfast, while I was rude to him about the eels. I thought about it on the ladder, with his hand on the upright beside my ankle. I thought about it over supper, with him at the far end of four yards of oak, eating on purpose, one bite and then the next.

Last night I nearly said his name with him inside me. I would rather say it to his face.

He waits for my candle, so I put it out. When I hear him on the stairs I light it again, fast, and I am at the door with it in my hand before he can knock.

I open the door.

Gold mask. Grey coat. A living man’s mouth under it, with color in it, and a jaw the right length, and eyes behind the gilt that have white in them. The face I ran from at four in the morning in a dead woman’s dress.

He has stood in this doorway in the dark every night I let him, and I have never once since the first night made him stand in it lit.