CLAUSE 10 (RECALLED). CONFIDENTIALITY. Neither party shall disclose the terms or nature of this agreement to any person not a signatory hereto, whether by speech, by writing, or by the preservation of drafts.

There were four thousand, one hundred and twelve unsent messages in the Drafts folder of Noelle's laptop, and she had decided to delete them all.

It was a Sunday morning, the twentieth of December, a thin blue-and-white day with frost on the garden wall and a dazzle of low sun coming through the guest room window. She sat at the pine desk in her father's old cardigan, with a pot of tea at her elbow, the little wooden dog at her right hand, and the plant on the sill giving off an air of stoic encouragement. Kasper had gone to the rink at eight. The house was quiet. She had decided, in the small gray hours, that she would put her affairs in order.

It was a tidy-minded woman's way of facing a catastrophe. She had made a list. It ran down the left side of a yellow legal pad, in neat blue ink, under the heading TODAY, and it read, in order: 1. Clear Drafts. 2. Write to Frances. 3. Shop. 4. Cook. 5. Tell him.

She had underlined the last one three times.

The Drafts folder was a graveyard. It went back nine years. There were unsent letters to editors, abandoned leads, half a dozen furious replies to a city councilman, a brief and extremely rude note to a man who had once called her "sweetheart" in a press box. There were pitches that had never been pitched. There was a draft, dated March of the year her father died, that began Dear Dad and went no further. She did not open that one. She selected it, and she held her finger above the key for a long time, and then she moved it to the other folder, the one marked KEEP, which contained exactly three things.

She went through the rest like a woman weeding a garden. Delete. Delete. Delete. A small clean click each time, and a brief pang, and the numbers going down on the screen. Two thousand. One thousand. Four hundred. By the time the tea had gone cold she had come to the bottom, and was left with a single document, last in the list, its name in plain black type.

PLAYING THE FIANCÉE (DRAFT 2)

She stopped.

It was not the one Dorian had shown her. That was the first draft, the one she had sent to Frances at ten past three on the second night. This was a second, fuller, longer attempt, written the following week in a fit of cold fury, and never sent to anyone. She had forgotten it. It had sat all this time in a drawer of her laptop like a mouse in a wall. She opened it, against her better judgment, and began to read.

It was terrible.

It was quite terrible. It was clever, and bitter, and very well written, and it was a shocking thing to read now. The woman in it was a stranger. She was cold and crisp and ironical, and she described the Captain, throughout, in a series of expert little portraits, as a surface to be managed. His jaw. His mannerisms. A catalog of his habits. There was a paragraph on the way he stood at the edge of the ice that she remembered having considered rather good. There was a whole page, God help her, on the likely market for a story about an unlikely couple.

Nowhere in it did the woman say what she felt. Nowhere did she say that he laughed with his whole face, or that he had washed every mug in the house on a Sunday morning to say sorry, or that he had once, in the middle of a storm, said: Not tonight, for the first time in my life I'm not alone in it.

She had not known him then. That was the thing. She had written a great deal about a man she had not yet met.

She shut the laptop, and sat looking at the lid.

She had intended to delete it. She did. She did it deliberately, with a firm hand, and a clean, quiet, irrevocable click, and then she did something she had never done in nine years of professional life: she emptied the trash. She watched the little bar fill and the numbers vanish. She turned off the computer. She laid her hands flat on the desk, on either side of the lid.

Then she opened it again, and wrote to Frances.

Dear Frances,

I've been meaning to write for weeks. I'm sorry that I haven't. I want to ask you for a favor, and I want to apologize in advance for asking it.

You'll remember the night in October when I sent you a proposal. I asked you to delete it, and you very kindly said you would. I'm writing to ask whether you still have a printed copy anywhere. I've learned that it may have been seen by someone it was never meant for. I would be grateful if you would destroy any copies you have, and if you could tell me who has had access.

I know this is a strange request. I'll explain, when I can. I'm in a position I didn't foresee, and I'm trying to put it right.

With love, and with all the gratitude in the world,

N.

She read it three times. She took out a word. She put it back. And she sent it, with the fine cold sinking feeling of a woman dropping a letter into a well, and sat for some time looking at the screen as if it might answer.

It did not.

She shopped.

It was a small cold market on the quay, with striped awnings and crates of oranges and a man who sold cheese from a barrow, and she moved down the aisles with a basket on her arm and a list in her fist. Eggs. Flour. Butter. A bag of good coffee, not Eco. A wedge of sharp cheese. A small tight cluster of red tomatoes, hothouse, absurdly expensive. A bottle of wine. A bunch of white freesias from the florist's cart, tied with string.

At the end of the quay, in the lee of the fish stalls, a boy of about twelve was selling Christmas trees.

They were small. They stood in a row against a wall, in buckets, a hopeful rank of green stubby things, smelling of resin and cold. She stood in front of them for several minutes. She had not had a tree in three years. It had not occurred to her. The house on Anchorage Row had none, and she had not asked, and Kasper, who had been brought up in a great plain Lutheran fastness of tidiness, had said nothing.

"How much?" said Noelle.

"Twelve," said the boy.

"For the small one?"

"Twelve for all of 'em. They're the same." He looked at her with cold shrewd eyes. "It's a good one. It's got a gap, but it's got character."

She bought it. She carried it home, in her arms, in the winter sun, with her basket looped over her wrist and the little branches prickling her chin, past a dozen astonished faces and a very large dog, and when she came in at the blue door she was breathless, and green with needles, and absurdly, fiercely happy.

It was a good plan. She told herself that, over the stove, at five o'clock.

It was a very good plan. She had thought it through with care. She was not going to tell him everything. She could not. There was Linnea, and a promise, and a day she had sworn to give, and a thing that was not hers to spend. But she could tell him this much. She could say: there is a man, and he has a page, and he is looking. She could say: there is something I left out. She could say: it concerns someone you love, and I cannot say who, unless you say I may.

And she could ask him. That was the heart of it. She could put it to him plainly, with her heart in her hand: would you let me out of Clause Nine?

He might say no. She knew that. But he might not. And she would have asked, honestly, in the open, with a candle on the table and her hands where he could see them, and whatever he answered, she would not have lied.

She stirred the sauce.

It was her mother's recipe. It was the only thing she knew how to make that was not toast. She had not made it since her mother left, when she was nine, and her father had taken on the cooking with a doomed and heroic good cheer, and she had learned it, at the age of twenty, from a card in an old tin. A simple red sauce, with onion and garlic and a bay leaf and a pinch of sugar. She stood over it in her apron with a wooden spoon, in the steam, with the freesias in a jam jar on the table and the tree in a bucket by the window, and the sticky note on the refrigerator door.

She had written it that afternoon.

NO CLAUSE TONIGHT, it said, in her small upright capitals, and beneath, smaller: Just dinner. Just us. (I have something to say.)

She had put it up at eye level. She had stood back. She had looked at it for a long time, a small yellow square among all the others, the House Rules, the Eco, the Knock, and she had felt, standing there in the warm kitchen, a great shaking calm settle over her like snow.

The key turned in the lock at ten past six.

"I'm home," called Kasper. "And I've got news. Don't, don't ask. Wait."

She heard the hall door bang, and the thud of a bag, and the creak of his brace, and then he was in the kitchen doorway, in his gray jacket, with his cheeks red from the cold and a snowflake melting in his hair, and she turned from the stove, and saw him, and the whole carefully constructed plan nearly came apart in her hands.

He was so happy.

It was written all over him. It lit his face from the inside, a boyish, unguarded, helpless radiance, as though somebody had switched on a lamp behind his eyes. He had a paper bag in one hand. He stood there in the door, looking at her, at the stove and the candle and the white flowers in the jar, at the small crooked green tree by the window with its bucket and its needles, and she watched his mouth open, and nothing come out.

"You got a tree," said Kasper.

"It's a very good tree."

"It's got a gap."

"It's got character."

"It's the best tree I've ever seen." His voice was thick. He set down the bag. He came across the kitchen in three strides and took her face in both hands, with a wooden spoon still in one of hers, and kissed her, long and hard and sweetly, in the steam. When he drew back, his eyes were bright. "You did all this."

"It's pasta."

"It's the most beautiful pasta in the world."

"You haven't tasted it."

"I don't need to." He pushed a lock of hair from her cheek. His thumbs were warm. "I've got news. I'm going to tell you, and you're going to say yes, and I'd like you to promise not to panic."

"That's a terrifying opening."

"It's from my mother."

She went still.

"She called at the rink. She never calls at the rink. She said," and he laughed, a little ruefully, "she said she'd watched the gala on the news, three times, and that she wanted to meet you, and that it was long past time, and that she was not going to wait for a wedding. She wants us for Christmas Eve. She's cooking for the whole family. It's Thursday." He drew a breath. "I said I'd ask. I said you were busy. I said a number of things, and she told me, in the voice, that I was eight years old and that you'd come."

The spoon was still in her hand. A bead of sauce slid down the handle onto her knuckle. She watched it go.

"Thursday," said Noelle.

"Thursday evening. Six o'clock. It's very informal. It's mostly Mom, and Lin, and the cat. And a great deal of ham." He hesitated. "You don't have to. If you'd rather not, I'll say it's the flu. I'll say you've got a deadline. I just thought, I'd like her to know you. I'd like you to be in the room where I grew up. I'd like," and his voice dropped, "very much to see you in it."

She looked at his face. It was open and anxious and tender. It was the face of a man who had asked for a very large thing in the hope that it would be taken as a small one.

I'll be sitting at the table, she thought. At his mother's table. Across from his sister. With the whole thing between us on the cloth like a platter of ham.

"I'd love to," said Noelle.

"You would?"

"I'd be honored."

"You're sure?"

"I'm very sure." She put down the spoon. She put her hand over his, where it lay against her cheek. "Kasper. Sit down. There's dinner. And I have something to say, and I'd like you to hear all of it before you say a word."

He looked at her.

It was a long look. The light in his face did not dim, but it altered, subtly, settling, the way a flame settles when a window is closed. His eyes went to the refrigerator. They traveled over the note, NO CLAUSE TONIGHT, and the little line beneath it, and she saw him read it twice.

"All right," said Kasper.

They ate at the kitchen table, by candlelight, with the tree in its bucket and the freesias in their jar and the rain beginning again, softly, against the glass. The pasta was good. It was better than she had expected. It was dark and rich and sweet and tasted of a kitchen she had not stood in for twenty years, and he ate two helpings, and said it was the best thing he had ever put in his mouth, and meant it. She could not eat. She sat with her fork in her hand and let the food go cold, and when at last he laid down his napkin and looked at her across the flame, she took a breath, and began.

"There's a man named Dorian Pike."

She told it in order. She had rehearsed it. She had written it on a card, in the end, and thrown the card away, and the order had stayed in her head like a map. She told him about the call, and the café on Quay Street, and the folded page on the table with its plain black title. She told him about the night after the contract, and the laptop, and the sleeplessness, and the proposal. A single page. A memoir, never to be written, never meant to be read. She told him that she had sent it to the one person she trusted. She told him what Dorian had said.

She did not stop. She did not look away. She watched his face.

He listened, quite still, with his hands round his glass.

He did not interrupt. A muscle moved in his jaw. At the word memoir his eyes went briefly to the candle and came back. At the word fiancée a small cold flicker went across his face, like a cloud over a field, and was gone. When she had finished, he said nothing for a long moment.

"You wrote a book proposal," said Kasper.

"Yes."

"About me."

"About the, about the thing. The arrangement. About what it was like." She swallowed. "It was a bad night. It was the second night. I was frightened. I didn't know you, I didn't know anything. I had just agreed to, I'd put my name on a contract with a man who had every reason to hate me. I thought, if I write it down, it'll stop going round my head. I sent it to Frances because she's the only person I've ever shown anything to."

"And you asked her to delete it."

"In the morning. She said she would."

"But she didn't."

"She kept a copy. She's sentimental. She didn't mean any harm." She drew a breath. "It's not that I wanted to use you. I want you to know that. I've never, since the night in the kitchen, I haven't once, I deleted everything this morning. It's gone. There's nothing."

"I believe you."

"You do?"

"Noelle." His voice was gentle. "Of course I believe you."

It was so simple. He said it as one says the time. She felt the words go through her like warm water, and her eyes stung, and she looked down at her plate until it passed.

"I'd be lying if I said it didn't sting," he said, after a moment. "To think of you writing it, in the dark, with the whole thing in, with me as the, it's a bit, I'll need a minute. But I understand it. I do. You were scared, and you did what you do. You made it into words." The corner of his mouth lifted. "It's a very Noelle thing to have done."

"It's a terrible thing."

"It's a very human one."

"Kasper," she said, and her voice shook. "That isn't all."

He waited.

"There's more. It's the bigger part. Dorian isn't, he doesn't care about the proposal. It's just how he's, it's a lever. What he wants is the article." She put her hands flat on the cloth, on either side of her plate, so that he could see them. "He's been going through it. The footnotes. He's found a place where, there's something I left out."

He did not move.

"It was a deliberate choice. It was mine, and I made it two years ago, and I'd make it again. It was the right thing. I believe that. But it means there's a page, a detail, a thing that was in the file, that I didn't print. And he knows it. He knows there's a gap. And he's looking." She forced herself to meet his eyes. "I've been trying to find a way to tell you for weeks. I can't, I'm not able to tell you everything, there's a, there are other people, and it isn't only mine. But I wanted you to know that it exists. I didn't want you to hear it first from him."

"What did you leave out?"

It was very quiet.

"It's about..." She stopped. Her tongue seemed to have swelled. "It's about someone you love. That's all I can say. And I'd like to say the rest. I want to. But I made a promise, a clause. It's yours. It's Clause Nine." Her heart was going like a drum. "So I'm asking. I'm asking you, Kasper, with everything I've got, to let me out of it. Just this once. Just for this. Let me say it."

The candle flickered.

For perhaps three seconds nothing happened. He sat quite motionless in the golden light, with one hand on the table and the other round the stem of his glass. His face was a blank. It was not hard. It was not cold. It was only utterly still, like a face on a coin.

And then something went across it, so quick that she almost missed it. A tightening. A flinch at the corner of the eye, such as a man gives when a hand is raised toward him in a dark room.

"Clause nine," said Kasper.

It came out sharp.

It was not loud. It was not even angry. It was a flat, hard, instinctive thing, the sound of a bolt being shot. It fell on the table between them like a dropped knife. She felt it in her chest, a clean hard blow, just under the breastbone, and the breath went out of her in a small cold rush.

He knew at once what he had done.

She saw it. She watched it travel across his face in stages: the blink, the start, the slow appalled dawning. His mouth opened. His hand came off the glass and half lifted, as though to catch the words and put them back. "Noelle," he said. "God. I'm sorry. That's not, I didn't mean."

"It's all right."

"It isn't. It came out wrong. It came out like a, I sounded like a stranger." He passed a hand over his face. His fingers were trembling. "I don't know why I did that. It's a reflex. It's, when somebody gets near it, it's like putting up an arm. It's got nothing to do with you."

"I know."

"I'm so sorry."

"Kasper, it's all right."

"I'd like to hear it. I want to, I do. I want you to be able to say anything to me. It's only." He stopped. He drew a long breath. "It's only that I've spent seven years, I don't know how to, I don't have a way of letting anyone near them. Not even you. Not even when I want to." His eyes were wet. "I've never wanted to so much in my life."

She could not answer. She sat across from him with her hands on the cloth. She looked at him, at the open stricken face and the shaking fingers, and she saw the whole shape of him laid out in the candlelight: a man standing in front of a door with his arms spread wide, so afraid of what lay behind it that he would not let her through, and so in love that he was begging her to forgive him for it.

I can't, she thought.

I can't do it. Not like this. Not by prying open the one thing he's guarded for seven years with his own two hands. Not while he's looking at me like that.

She had a page of notes in her lap. She had written the words on the back of an envelope, in case her nerve failed, a short scrawled list: the file, page forty-one, the second name. She looked down at it. And slowly, very slowly, with a hand that did not feel like her own, she folded it in half, and in half again, and put it in the pocket of her apron.

"It's not the right time," said Noelle.

"Noelle..."

"It's all right. I mean it." She managed a smile. It came out lopsided and wet. "I shouldn't have asked tonight. It's a lot. There's Christmas. Your mother. I picked a terrible evening."

"I don't want you to stop."

"I'm not stopping. I'm only." She drew a breath. "Waiting. A little. Until you're ready. You said you'd wait for me. It seems only fair."

He looked at her for a long time. Then he rose, and came round the table, and knelt down in front of her chair, in the candlelight, with his bad knee on the boards and his hands over hers. He pressed his forehead to hers.

"Thank you," he said. "I'll try. I swear I'll try."

"I know you will."

"I'll learn how."

"I know."

"I love you," said Kasper, very low, into her hair.

It was out before either of them could stop it. It slipped from him like a breath. She felt it, rather than heard it, against her temple: a warm, shuddering, unbearable thing, with all the weight of seven years behind it. He went rigid. She felt him realize, and begin to draw back, and she put both arms around his neck and held him where he was.

"Don't take it back," she whispered.

"I wasn't going to."

"Don't."

"I'm not." His voice cracked. "I'm only, you said not yet. I'm sorry. I couldn't hold it."

"I know."

"I know you can't say it."

"I can't say it," said Noelle, and her face crumpled, and she pressed her mouth against his shoulder to stop the sound. "Not yet. But it isn't because it isn't true."

"I know that too."

"It's the truest thing I've got."

"Then it's enough," said Kasper, and held her, there on the kitchen floor in the dying candlelight, with the little tree standing in its bucket and the rain on the window, while the sauce cooled on the stove and the freesias breathed their cold sweet breath into the room.

The phone buzzed at half past ten.

They had washed up. They had sat by the stove with a blanket and a pot of tea, talking of other things: Teo, and the Calder Ridge game, and what to bring to a woman who had everything and wanted only that her son should eat. He had gone up to run the bath. She was alone in the kitchen, in the soft gold dark, wiping a plate that was already dry, when the little rectangle on the counter lit with a small clear sound.

She looked at it.

It was an email. She knew the name before she had read the line. Her breath caught, and held, like a bird in a net.

From: Frances Aldous Subject: Re: A favor

She opened it with her thumb.

Dear Noelle,

My dear girl. I'm so very sorry. I have only just seen your message. I've been away at my sister's and I'm afraid I'm hopelessly behind.

I've destroyed my copy of the proposal. You have my word. I should have done it in October, and I regret that I didn't. I let Dorian read it, I'm ashamed to say. He came into my office, and I was feeling nostalgic, and he's such a charming boy, and I thought it could do no harm.

But I'm afraid there is something else, and I must tell you at once.

Dorian has been going through the archive. The legal department keeps all reporters' working files for three years under the retention policy, as you'll remember, and yours are still in the basement. He signed out the boxes for The Quiet Wreck on the twelfth. I only saw the log this morning. He had the clerk's permission, under the column's research privileges, and I can't think how I'd have stopped it. The boxes included your notebooks. All of them.

I don't know what he wants with them. I'm sure it's only curiosity. But you asked me to tell you who has had access, and I thought you should know.

Please call me.

All my love, F.

She read it to the end.

She read it again, slowly, with the cold dread settling through her like a stone sinking into a pond. A cold clear line ran down the center of her. Under the retention policy. Reporters' working files. The notebooks. All of them.

She knew exactly what was in the third.

She could see it. She could see the page, in the stiff green-backed reporter's notebook, in the ink of a night two years ago, in the neat upright hand she had taught herself at fourteen. She had been so tired. She had been reading the file at the kitchen table at one in the morning, with a mug going cold at her elbow, and when she came to the bottom of page forty-one she had written it down. She had written it by reflex, as she wrote everything, to fix it in her mind, as a record of what she had found and what she had decided not to use. Four words and a number.

L. Lindqvist, age 17. Driver.

And under it, in the small round letters she kept for her own private use, the only sentence in the whole notebook that was not a fact: Not this. Never this.

She stood at the kitchen counter with the phone in her hand. Above her, the water was running in the bathroom, and she could hear him humming, a low tuneless contented drone, moving about on the creaking boards of the floor above. The little tree stood by the window. The candle had burned down to a stub. The sauce was cold on the stove, and the freesias had begun to droop, and in the quiet she heard, very clearly, with the sharpness of a thing heard in a dream, the single patient click of a latch turning over in a dark and distant room.

Dorian Pike had her notebooks. Dorian Pike was very, very patient.

And she had given a girl a day.