It was a quarter past two in the morning, and neither of them had moved.

The cheque from Vern Rusk lay in the circle of lamplight between them, a yellowed slip of paper with a jagged name on it and a single word in the memo line. Tinplate. Sienna had been looking at it for so long that the letters had begun to swim. Across the table the fire had burned down to a red seam in the grate, and the snow lay on the window sills outside, unmoving, and the house seemed to have gone to sleep around the two of them and left the library lit, like a ship's lantern on a dark sea.

"What is it?" she said at last. "Tinplate."

Matteo roused himself. He had been sitting in the chair at her left hand for four hours with his burned hand in his lap and his eyes half closed, and when he spoke his voice was rough with tiredness. "A steel sheet coated in tin. It is the stuff of cans. We carry it. Everyone on the quay carries it. A hundred tons of it passed through Pier Two last spring and not one person in the harbor could have told you its name five minutes later."

"Then why would a moneylender pay a drunk twenty thousand for it?"

"I don't know."

"It might not be a cargo."

"No." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his good hand. "It might be a name. A place. A man. It might be a joke." A faint, tired breath that was almost a laugh. "Rusk was fond of jokes. He used to send my father a crate of oranges every Christmas, with a note that said, from a friend of the family. My father never once ate one."

She wrote the word on the clean page of the blue notebook, and drew a box around it, and beside it, in smaller letters, Rusk, Carrow? She looked at what she had written. Then she looked at the mountain of paper in front of her, the red-taped bundles and the green ledgers and the private book in his slanting hand, and a strange feeling came over her, slow and heavy and not at all what she had expected.

He had given her everything.

She had known it, of course, in the first moment, when he laid the keys on the table. But she had been angry then, and angry people see only the edge of a thing. Now the anger had gone out of her, quietly, like water out of a basin, and what was left behind was a kind of clear tired astonishment. She counted the objects in front of her as she would have counted a tray of samples. A key to his study. Ten years of accounts. His own handwritten record of every suspicion he had held since September. The names of the men he had set to watch the oldest friend of his dead father. There was not a single thing in the pile that a clever enemy could not have used to ruin him.

And he had put it into the hands of a woman who, a week ago, had written sixty-five percent beside his initials.

She thought of him standing at the open safe with his shoulders squared, spinning the dial in plain sight, saying I won't ask for it to be forgiven. It was not a gesture. She knew a gesture when she saw one, she had been raised among them. It had cost him something she could not name, some deep and ancient reflex of a man who had learned at six that the person who holds the keys is the person who survives.

"Ask me something," said Matteo.

She looked up. He was watching her across the table, quietly, with his head resting against the back of the chair.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Anything. You have been reading for six hours, and I can tell by the way you hold your pen that you have a list. Ask me. I would rather you tried me now than lay awake with it."

"That's not how it works."

"It is exactly how it works." His mouth moved. "I have been told so by an authority."

She almost smiled. Instead she took up her pen, and tested him, because it was the only way she knew to be fair. She asked what the Welfare Fund had paid in August, and he told her, to the penny, and the name of the widow it had gone to. She asked who had signed the winter coal order, and he told her, and added, without being asked, that the signature on the second line had looked wrong to him for a year and that he had not liked to say so. She asked him what his father had thought of Dario Vance, and he thought for a long time, and said, "He trusted him. It was the only thing he ever trusted without testing. I used to wonder what Dario had done to deserve it." She asked him whether he had ever been to Carrow, and he said twice, once for a funeral and once to buy a ship. She asked, in an even voice, whether he had slept at all since the quay.

"No," said Matteo.

"Why not?"

"Because you were in the room."

It was not said to touch her. It was a plain fact, set down as he might have set down a figure in a ledger, and it went through her as a pin goes through paper.

She asked him nothing else. There was one question she had not put, and she knew it, and he must have known too. It stood at the edge of the lamplight like a third person at the table. Everything that bears on you. He had said it twice, in two different rooms, and twice she had felt the neat small click of a door being held a little less than shut. She could have asked it now. She had the long night in front of her and the nerve of a woman who has just been given every key in a house.

But he was so tired. He sat with his head against the leather and his eyes shadowed gray, and he looked, in the low gold light, like a man who has walked a very long way and has just been told that he may stop. She could not do it. She closed the notebook on her thumb.

She took out her pen again and opened to the last page. The line was still there, in her small hard capitals, under the date of the library. M.B., and a number. Sixty-five. She looked at it for a long time. It had been seventy once. It had been a way of keeping the cold animal in her spine fed and quiet, a figure to hold against the tenderness that kept rising in her like water in a cellar. It had been honest, and she had been proud of it.

She drew a line through it.

She wrote beneath it, very small, Sixty.

It was a ridiculous number. She knew that as she wrote it. It was a number a mathematician would have laughed at, a figure taken from nowhere, and she could not have defended it to a seminar for five minutes. But it was true. She felt it settle into her. She did not believe him wholly. But, for the first time since the morning she woke in the lab, the part of her that believed him was larger than the part that did not.

And the forty percent that remained was not about a card, or a flute, or a cheque with a lift in the signature. It was about a small cold shape she could feel in the dark behind his careful sentences, a thing he had put in a drawer and was afraid to take out. She knew it was there. She did not yet know what it was. And she had, she realized, with a tired and wondering dismay, decided that she would rather learn it from him than find it for herself.

The clock in the hall struck three.

"You should sleep," said Matteo.

"So should you."

"I shall." He rose, slowly. He stood for a moment with his good hand on the back of the chair, steadying himself, and she saw how stiff he was from the hours of sitting. "Marco has a man on the road to Carrow at six. I'll go down to the study and wait for the telephone. Please take the notebook to your room, if you like, and the ledger. I'd like you to have them by you." A small pause. "I have a very strong wish to see you walk up those stairs."

"Is that a rule?"

"It's a wish."

He went to the door. He walked as he always walked now, a pace slower than he need, with his hands clasped lightly behind him. At the threshold he stopped. His fingers closed on the handle. She saw his shoulders draw up and settle, a movement that she had learned by heart. It was the movement of a man who has decided to say something and has decided, on reflection, to say something else.

"Goodnight, Sienna," he said, without turning round.

She was on her feet.

She did not remember rising. She remembered only that the chair was behind her, and the lamp was behind her, and the long carpet was under her feet, and that her heart was beating so loudly that she thought it must be audible in the hall. The word was already in her mouth before she knew what it would be.

"Matteo."

He turned.

He stood in the doorway with the dark passage behind him and the lamplight on his face. She came across the room, slowly, between the tables and the ladder and the brass rail, and stopped a pace from him. He looked at her with perfect stillness. His hand was still on the latch.

"Rule two," said Sienna. Her voice was not quite steady. "In private, we do not perform. I wrote it. I put it up on the board with my own chalk."

"I remember."

"Not one word, not one gesture, not one look that is for an audience."

"Yes."

"There is no audience in this room." She drew a breath. "There hasn't been one since eleven o'clock. Mrs. Venn is asleep. Marco is in the hall with his back turned. The only person who could be watching us is a dead man in a chandler's loft, and he is not interested." She looked up at him. She had to tilt her head to do it. "So I want to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly, because you always do."

"Ask."

"Is it still pretending," Sienna said, "if I mean it?"

The room was silent.

She watched the words go in. She watched them cross his face, one by one, as she had watched a hundred other things cross it: surprise, then disbelief, then something so raw and so painfully hopeful that she almost looked away. His lips parted. His hand fell from the latch. A faint tremor went through him from shoulder to wrist, and she saw him try to master it and fail.

"Mean what?" said Matteo. It was hardly more than a breath.

She did not answer. She was not certain she could have found the words. She put out her hand instead and laid it flat against the front of his shirt, over the place where a heart ought to be, and felt it going under her palm like a bird in a box. Then she rose up on her toes, and put her other hand against his jaw, and kissed him.

It was a very small kiss.

It lasted perhaps two seconds. It was clumsy, and quick, and slightly off center, the kiss of a woman who has not done it for a long time and has never done it with so much at stake. Her mouth met the corner of his. She tasted tea and woodsmoke and the faint salt of something she did not want to name. She felt the roughness of his unshaven jaw under her fingers and the quick hot gust of his breath against her lip.

He did not move.

He stood as if he had been turned to stone. His hands hung at his sides, open, rigid, the fingers spread, like the hands of a man who has been told to keep very still while something wonderful and dangerous passes over him. She felt the shudder go through him. She felt his body hold itself back, with a force that frightened her, as one holds a door against a gale. He did not kiss her back. He did not touch her. He did nothing at all. And she understood, in a rush of tenderness so fierce that it made her eyes sting, that it was rule three. It was a rule she had written herself, in her own hard capitals, on a blackboard, and he was keeping it with every ounce of the strength he possessed, even now, even here.

She drew back an inch. She opened her eyes.

His were closed. His lashes lay dark against skin gone pale, and a muscle was jumping in his jaw. He was breathing as if he had been running.

"Matteo," she whispered.

"I did not," he said, and stopped. His voice cracked. "I did not want to presume."

"I know."

"I have wanted this," he said, very low, "for longer than you can possibly imagine. And I find that I do not know what to do with my hands."

She laughed. It was a shaky, helpless, wet little sound, and it broke something in the air between them. She reached down, and found the lapel of his shirt, the soft white cotton, still warm from the fire, and she closed her fist in it.

She pulled him down to her.

The second kiss was not clumsy. It was slow, and careful, and deliberate, and it went through her like the first deep breath after being under water. His mouth was warm. It was unbelievably gentle. It moved against hers with a kind of trembling reverence, as if he were learning a language he had once known by heart and had very nearly forgotten. Her eyes closed. She felt the lamp, and the carpet, and the bright cold winter world go out like a candle.

He lifted his hands.

She felt them hover. They rose from his sides like birds from a branch, and stopped, a quarter inch from her waist, without touching. She felt the heat of them through the cloth. And against her lips, so softly that she felt it more than heard it, he said, "May I?"

"Yes," said Sienna.

His hands closed on her.

One rested at the small of her back, and the other, the burned one, in its light dressing, lay very carefully along the line of her shoulder blade, barely touching, as if she were something that could be bruised. He drew her in against him, slowly, a little at a time, and she went. Her fingers had found their way into the hair at the back of his neck. She felt the long shudder run through him, and the helpless, broken sound he made against her mouth, and she thought: I have never in my life been held like this. Not in either life. Not once.

When at last they drew apart, it was by an inch.

His forehead rested against hers. Neither of them could breathe properly. She could feel his heart, going hard and quick against her ribs, and her own answering it, beat for beat, out of time and then into time. The lamp hissed. A coal settled. In the long dark room, with the snow pressing silent against the glass and the house asleep around them, two people who had died together stood so close that they shared a single breath.

"Tell me when to stop," Matteo said. His voice was barely there.

"Not yet."

"Sienna."

"I said not yet."

He made a sound that was half a groan and half a laugh, and she felt his mouth find hers again, softer this time, almost shy, a brief and tender pressure like a promise. Then he drew back, a very little, and kissed her forehead. He did it with a care so profound that she felt it all the way down to her feet. His lips rested against her skin for a long moment, warm and dry, and she heard him draw a long unsteady breath that seemed to come up from the soles of his boots.

"I said I would say goodnight," he murmured against her hair, "and I find that I am going to keep my word. I am going to say it now, and I am going to go down to the study. And if you would still like me to, in the morning, when the sun is up and you have had your coffee and a night to think, I would like to be asked again."

"You want to be asked."

"I should like to be chosen," said Matteo, "in the daylight."

She closed her eyes. She felt the words settle somewhere deep, a place she had not known was empty. She had been chosen once, in another life, in a ledger, in a debt, in a clause. It had not felt like this. It had felt like a door being closed behind her.

"Goodnight, Matteo," she said.

"Goodnight."

He let her go. He did it slowly, one hand and then the other, and she felt the cold rush in where his warmth had been. He stood a moment longer in the doorway, looking at her, with an expression on his face that she would carry for the rest of her life. It was wonder, and grief, and a light so bright that it hurt to look at. Then he went out, and closed the door softly behind him, and she heard his footsteps go away down the dark passage and on to the stairs.

She stood in the middle of the library.

She put her fingers to her mouth. They were trembling. It was the strangest thing: she felt as though someone had taken the entire map of her life and quietly turned it a quarter turn, so that the same roads ran in different directions. She did not know where they led. She knew only that she had stopped pretending, somewhere in the last five minutes, and that there was no road back to the place where she had been.

She gathered up the notebook and the ledger and the thin gray envelope. She put out the lamp. She climbed the stairs in the dark, with one hand on the banister, and drew the bolt behind her in the green room, and stood for a long while at the window, looking down at the snow lying blue and silent in the garden.

She did not sleep.

She lay on her back under the celery-colored quilt with her eyes open, looking at the ceiling, and let herself go over it. The weight of his hands. The sound he had made. The word daylight. Beneath it all, thin and cold and persistent, like a draft under a door, ran a single small fact she could not put away. She had kissed a man tonight who had told her everything, and the one thing she had not asked was the one thing he had not said.

She turned on her side, and drew her knees up, and pressed her palm flat against her own mouth.

"Tomorrow," she whispered into the dark. "I'll ask him tomorrow."

But she knew, even as she said it, that she would not.