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“You have done this before,” he says.

“I’ve been loud in a lot of rooms.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It’s the same thing I’ve got.” The dress has not let me finish a breath in an hour. “What are you doing here, if you’re not buying and you’re not selling?”

“Buying the sale register.”

“The what?”

“The market keeps a register of every sale it has ever made. Every market, back years. Which town each lot came from, who paid, where she went. After tonight’s ball the auctioneer sells copies of the old sales to anyone with coin, and there is always a family who wants to know where a daughter ended up.”

“That’s a horrible answer.”

“It’s true.”

I lean my shoulder on the wall. “What do you want with it?”

“I keep accounts of a kind. The register tells me things I cannot ask people.” He says it plainly. “That is all I will tell you tonight, and it is more than I meant to.”

He goes still again. His attention leaves me for two seconds and lands somewhere out in the crowd, like a dog hearing something under the floorboards. Then it comes back.

“What is it?” I say.

“Nothing that belongs to tonight.”

The music starts at the far end. Badly. Two fiddles, and the left one is under, and the whole room ripples with people deciding not to notice.

I finish what’s left of my wine. “You’re not going to ask me to dance.”

He holds out his hand.

“I’m terrible,” I say, “and this dress is trying to kill me,” and I take it.

The floor is full of people doing it properly. We are not. He does not fit into the pattern and does not try to, and I step on him twice, and the second time I laugh so hard I have to put my forehead against his chest, which is how I find out that he is cold all through, like a church wall in August, and that under the wine and the glue and four hundred bodies he smells of rain on stone.

His hand is flat on my back, and it reaches from my waist to my shoulder blades, and I can feel every finger of it through the silk. I get half a breath in. It does not do the job. I want to stop stepping on him so I can stop laughing and feel it.

“You’re freezing,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Is that always, or is that tonight?”

“Always.”

“That’s the first fact you’ve given me all night, and it wasn’t a good one.”

“No.”

“I’m going to keep asking. I want you to know that going in.” I want him to keep answering, in that voice, at that distance, for as long as I can make it last.

“I know it,” he says, and I am in trouble, and I know that too.

Then he looks at the side of my head. Every man in this hall tonight has looked at the front of this dress, which Katell’s sister filled out better than I ever will, and he is looking at my ear, at the angle I am holding my head, at what I am doing with my attention.

In twenty-six years nobody has ever once looked at me listening.