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“For a door nobody could put me out of. I checked the balance on our wedding night.”

“Our wedding night.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he says.

I look up.

“Keep it.” He leans back against the counter. “A door’s not the same as leaving. I’d rather you stay because you’ve got one. So what are you asking me?”

There it is. I make myself answer before fear improves the wording.

“I want to stay married to you. If my proposal fails. If my work authorization takes longer than we want. If Tova decides she wants Sweden and we have to sit at this table and work out what that means.”

“That’s a lot of ifs.”

“It is a complete list.”

“It’s a list of everything that can go wrong.” He folds his arms. “I’m not on it.”

I start to answer and he shakes his head once.

“Look at me, Astrid. No contract. A hand that won’t close. Nothing left in this house for me to fix.” He says it plainly, a man reading off a scoresheet. “So tell me what you want me for.”

There is nothing in his face holding the room up. In all the months I have known him I have not seen it empty.

I have a list for this too. I do not use it.

“You hum when you do the dishes,” I say. “You cannot carry a tune. You do it every night anyway, as though nobody in the house can hear you.”

He goes very still.

“You talk through every silence in this house except the ones that matter. Those you sit in.”

His arms come down.

“You washed her cup.”

“Astrid.”

“You sat on the floor beside that piano and asked me to sit with you, and you did not want one other thing from me. Nobody had ever asked me for only that.”

I do not look away from him.

“I do not want you for anything you can do. I am here because I love you.” My voice holds. “That is the whole list.”

Something comes back into his eyes. He does not hurry it.

There is one more question. It has been in my mouth since the elevator, and it will not come out of it.

I open my mouth. I close it again.

He does not fill the silence. He did not fill it that night by the piano either.

“Why did you ask me to stay?”

It comes out smaller than I meant it to.