It was Matteo who spoke first, and it was not at all what she had braced for.

"May I ask you something first?"

The lamps of the great hall burned gold on the black and white marble. Somewhere down the kitchen passage a pan clattered and Mrs. Venn's voice rose in mild reproach and then fell away, as though a door had been closed on it with great tact. Sienna stood at the foot of the stairs with the blue notebook pressed against her ribs and her hand in his, and the question she had carried up from the sea, the one about a drawer and a debt and a line in a dead man's hand, sat behind her teeth.

"Yes," she said.

"You may say no. I want you to hear that before anything else. You may say it now, or in an hour, or at any moment at all, and nothing in this house will change. I would not think less of you. I would think only that you were wise." He drew a breath. His eyes were very dark in the lamplight, and the color had gone out of his face. "I should like to stay with you tonight. Not in the chair. Not across the passage." A faint rueful flinch crossed his mouth. "I seem to have run out of sensible things to say. I should like to be with you. It is all that I have."

She looked down at their joined hands.

It was a small thing, and she had learned to read small things. His hand lay in hers, long and brown and steady. There was no tremor in it at all. She remembered a registry table, a pen that skipped, a man pressing one hand over the other to keep the nib still. She remembered a long bright room above the quay, and what he had said afterwards: It has never once been steady. I have never wanted it to be. And she stood in the hall of the house where they had died and watched that hand not shake, and understood that it had stopped shaking some time ago, somewhere between a fire on a quay and a boathouse in the sun, and that he had not noticed.

Now, she thought. Ask him now.

The words were there. They were ready in her mouth, plain and cold and exact. Tell me about the debt. Tell me about the page you tore out. She felt them rise, and she felt something else rise behind them, slower and warmer and far more dangerous, and she saw very clearly what would happen if she said them. His face would close. The steady hand would begin, a very little, to tremble. And the thing he was offering, so humbly, with the color gone from his cheeks and his whole heart standing in his eyes, would be put away on a shelf for another night, and perhaps for ever.

I will ask him in the morning, she told herself.

It was the third time she had said it. She knew it, as one knows a figure written wrongly in a margin, and she left it standing.

"Yes," said Sienna.

He did not move. "Yes to which?"

"To all of it." She heard her own voice, low and unsteady and determined. "I'd like you to stay. And I'd like you to stop asking permission to want things, at least for tonight. You may ask me anything else."

The breath went out of him in a rush. For a moment he looked so young, and so astonished, that she nearly laughed. "I shall ask you a great deal else," he said gravely. "I expect to be very tiresome about it."

"Good."

"May I..." He stopped. The smile came, slow and helpless and unguarded, the one that got out of him without leave. "I was going to ask whether I might take you upstairs. I find that it sounds ridiculous out loud."

"It does," said Sienna. "Ask anyway."

He did, and she said yes, and they went up.

The staircase curved away through shadows. On the second landing, a tall window looked out on a garden gone white and blue under the moon. On the third, the long east corridor ran away before them into the dark, hung with its gilt-framed harbor maps and, between them, the portraits she never looked at. A woman with a pale oval face. A woman with her hair loose, laughing, in a yellow dress. He walked beside her down the length of it with her hand in his, and she realized, with a small lurch, that he had walked this passage on a hundred nights and had never once, in her presence, lifted his eyes to the frames. He did not lift them now. But as they passed the one in the yellow dress, he turned his head, very slightly, and she felt his fingers tighten, and she thought: she would have liked this.

The door at the end was shut. It was a dark wood door with a brass handle, and the single steel key stood in the lock where it always stood. Sienna turned it. The old mechanism went over with a heavy, well-oiled sound, and the door swung inward on the room she had slept in for eight weeks and had never once, until tonight, entered with a light heart.

The lamp by the bed had been lit. Mrs. Venn, she thought, with a flush. Mrs. Venn, who had been at the end of the telephone and the top of every stair since September, and who knew precisely what a lit lamp meant.

He stopped on the threshold.

He did it as he had done it on the night of the wedding, a pace short of the sill, with his hands at his sides. She turned and looked at him. He stood in the dim corridor with the light falling across half his face, and his eyes went past her, over her shoulder, to the pale green walls and the big bed and the bare stretch of wall by the window where a sideboard had once stood. She saw him look at it. She saw something cross his face, quick and bleak, and be put away.

"If this is not the room," said Matteo, very low, "I will go to any other. There are fourteen. I would sleep in the stables."

"It's the room." She held out her hand. "I'd like it to be this one. I think I should like to put something else here, over the other thing."

He was silent for a moment. "Are you certain?"

"No," said Sienna. "But I'm certain about you."

He crossed the sill. She felt the room take him in, the lamp and the green walls and the high shelf where a small glass vial stood with a paper label in a girl's careful capitals. He did not look at it. He looked at her. Then she reached past him and shut the door, and drew the heavy bolt on the inside, and it slid home with a soft solid sound.

It was the first time in two lives that she had shot a bolt with someone in the room that she wanted there.

"May I?" he said.

She had not noticed he had lifted his hand. It hung an inch from her face, waiting, with the fingers a little curved. She nodded. He laid his palm along her cheek, and she closed her eyes, and felt the warmth of it go through her like a cup of something hot on a winter morning.

"You are crying," said Matteo.

"I'm not."

"A little." His thumb moved, very lightly, along the bone. "It is all right. It is permitted."

"It's only that I'm happy," said Sienna. "I'm not good at it. I keep waiting for someone to take it away."

He did not say that no one would. He was too honest, and she loved him for it. He only drew her gently in, until her forehead rested against his collarbone, and held her there, with his chin on her hair, and let her breathe. The lamp hissed. A long way below, the sea moved against the foot of the cliff. After a time she lifted her face.

She kissed him, and he kissed her back, and this time there was nothing careful in it.

It was slow, and deep, and unhurried. It had the quality of a long breath let out. She felt his hands come to rest at her waist, light and sure, and felt them ask a silent question, and answered it by drawing him closer. His mouth moved on hers as if he had been given a language and meant to learn every word. She put her hands to his shirt. The top button gave, and the next. She did it one at a time, because it seemed to matter that she should, and she felt him go still under her fingers and then, with a shaken laugh against her mouth, bend his head so that she could reach.

"You are better at this than I am," he said.

"I've had practice. I do it with sample tubes."

"I shall try not to feel like a sample."

"Hush," said Sienna, and kissed him again.

He asked, at every step. It was almost unbearable. When his fingers found the fastening at the back of her dress he stopped and said her name, and she said yes, and the zip went down by a quarter inch at a time, as though each one were a thing to be agreed on separately. When the green wool slid from her shoulders she felt the cold of the room on her skin and then, at once, the heat of his hands, and she heard herself make a small sound that she had not known she possessed. He looked at her. He did not look away or down. He looked at her face, with a kind of stricken reverence, as though he had come a very long way on foot and was afraid that it would turn out to be a painting.

"May I tell you something?" he said.

"You may tell me anything."

"I have imagined this," said Matteo. His voice was not steady. "I should be ashamed to say how often. I have imagined it in this room, God forgive me, and every time I have woken with my hands shaking. I did not think I should ever be allowed to find out whether I had got it right."

"And have you?"

"Not at all." His smile broke. "I had not imagined that you would laugh."

She was laughing. She had not noticed. It had come up out of the middle of her, wet and shaky and helpless, and she put her forehead against his shoulder and let it. He held her. He was laughing too, silently, so that she felt it as a faint shudder against her ribs, and for a moment they stood in the lamplight like two people who had been carrying a great weight up a long flight of stairs and had just been told, with a certain irony, that they might put it down.

He lifted her, then. It was done so gently that she understood it only when her feet left the floor. She put her arms round his neck and felt, against her wrist, how fast his pulse was going. He carried her across the room, past the writing desk and the small high shelf, to the wide bed with its coverlet the color of pale celery, and laid her down on it as one lays down something that might wake. Then he knelt on the edge, and waited.

"Come here," said Sienna.

What followed she would remember afterwards not as a series of things but as a single long warmth, slow and bright, with all the edges worn away. There were his hands. They were large and sure and, to her endless wonder, steady, and they moved over her as if he were learning a map he meant to keep. There was his mouth at her shoulder, and at the inside of her wrist, where her pulse was, and where he stayed, and said against it in a voice she could barely hear, "Here. This is the one I could never find." There was the lamp turned low and amber, and the sound of her own breath, and his. There was the astonishing ease of it, the way her body, which she had held braced against the world for twelve months and for twenty-six years before that, simply let go.

He asked, at every step, and she answered each time, with her mouth or her hands or his name, and every time he let out his breath as though he had been given something he did not expect to keep. She learned that he laughed when he was nervous. She learned that his shirt had one button that stuck. She learned how his face looked when he was not guarding it, which was young, and a little dazed, and hers. Once she lifted her hand to his cheek, and he turned his head and kissed the center of her palm, and she thought that she had never in her life been looked at like that, as though she were the one thing in the room that was real.

Near the middle of it she opened her eyes, and a cold thing slid under her ribs.

It was only the floor. Her eyes had fallen, without her meaning it, on the stretch of carpet beside the bed, plain gray wool, new and unremarkable, where the Persian rug had once lain in gold and rust. There was no rug. There was no bottle sweating in a bucket, no ribbon, no card. But the lamp threw a long shadow across the floor, and in the corner of her eye a shape seemed to stand in a doorway with the light behind it. Her breath snagged. Her fingers, which had been in his hair, closed.

He stopped at once.

He did not pull away, and he did not ask what was wrong. He stayed where he was, his weight on his forearms, his body held quiet, and said only, very softly, "Sienna."

"It's nothing."

"I do not think it is." His forehead came down against hers. His eyes were dark and steady, and what was in them was not frustration but a great waiting tenderness. "We can stop. For as long as you like. I shall be here, and I shall not mind."

"I don't want to stop."

"Then we shall not. But we shall not go on until you say." He kissed the corner of her eye, where the damp had gathered. "What did you see?"

"The floor." She was shaking. "It's the carpet. Not the carpet. The place."

"I know." He drew the heavy coverlet over her shoulders and held her, only held her, with his heart going hard against her ribs. "I took out the rug in March. It was an ugly thing. I burned it in the garden, and Mrs. Venn watched from the kitchen window and said nothing for a week." A thread of rueful humor ran under his voice. "It did not occur to me that you would see it anyway. I should have said so. I am sorry. I should have asked whether this was the right place."

"It is the right place," said Sienna.

She was surprised at how firm it sounded. She lay with her cheek on his shoulder while the cold drained out of her, and looked at the bare pale patch on the wall where the sideboard had stood. She thought of a bridal suite at the top of a hill, and a silk skirt spread on a Persian rug, and she thought, with a great swelling clarity that left her light-headed: I am not going to leave this room to that girl. I will not leave her the last word.

"Not yet," she said.

"Then we shall..."

"Not yet," said Sienna, "and then, now."

He lifted his head and looked at her. She held his gaze and let him see exactly what she meant, and she watched him read it, slowly, and let out a long unsteady breath. He bent and kissed her, softly at first, as if she might break, and then not softly at all.

After that there was only the warmth. It rose in her like the tide through a harbor, and it did not stop. It carried her up and out of the room, past the lamp and the green walls, past every cold place she had been afraid of, and set her down on a shore she had never seen. She heard herself cry out, briefly, startled. She heard him, low and broken against her ear, saying her name, and again, as though it were a prayer he had known all his life and had at last been given leave to say. When it was over they lay in the wreck of the celery-colored coverlet, tangled together, and she felt the length of his body shudder once and then go slack with a kind of helpless peace.

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

The lamp burned lower. A faint thread of wind came in under the balcony door and stirred the curtains, and somewhere, a long way off, a ship's horn sounded over the harbor. She lay with her ear against his chest and listened to his heart come down from its gallop, slowly, one beat at a time, until it was a deep steady thing like the sea.

He was warm. She noticed it with a small shock of wonder. His hand lay on her back, spread flat between her shoulder blades, and it was warm. It was not the warmth of a fever or a fire. It was the plain gentle heat of a living man, and it went into her like sun into stone.

"Your hand," said Sienna, drowsily.

"Is something the matter with it?"

"It isn't cold."

He was quiet. Then she felt his fingers close, very lightly, on her shoulder. His voice, when it came, was muffled against her hair.

"Every night for two years," said Matteo, "it was cold. In the dream. I woke with it like ice, and could not feel the fingers, and I lay in the dark and thought, that is what it was. That is what she felt, at the end." He drew a long breath. "And here it is. Warm. I find that I do not quite know what to do with it."

"Keep it," said Sienna.

"I intend to."

She turned her head and pressed her mouth to the center of his chest. She felt him tremble. And she said it, because it was true, and because she had been wanting to say it for three months without knowing what it was.

"I held on."

"I know."

"I did. In the dream I couldn't, but I did. I want you to know that I'd have held on for ever."

"I know," said Matteo, hoarsely. His arms closed round her and he held her so tightly that she could scarcely breathe, and she did not mind. "You held on, Sienna. You held on. You held on."

They slept, in the end, as children sleep, all at once and without ceremony. She went down into a warm dark with his heart beneath her cheek and no dream waiting at the bottom of it.

She woke once, before dawn.

It was the hour when the house goes still and every sound within it seems to come from a great way off. The lamp had burned out. A thin gray light lay along the edge of the curtains, and the room smelled of cedar and linen and warm skin. She lay with her head on his arm and did not at first know what had woken her.

Then she knew. It was a feeling, the soft steady weight of a gaze.

She turned her head.

He was awake. He lay on his side, facing her, still, with his head propped on his hand, and he was looking at her. His eyes were open wide in the gray light. He did not smile. There was nothing in his face but a kind of awed, tender, desperate attention, as though he were committing her to memory, line by line, in case it should be taken. She saw him not blink. She saw that he had not, perhaps, for a long time.

"You didn't sleep," she whispered.

"I did. For an hour." His voice was hardly a breath. "And then I woke, and could not shut my eyes. I was afraid that if I did, it would be the other morning, and you would not be here."

She put her hand up and laid it against his face. His jaw was rough with the beginning of a beard. A tear stood in the corner of his eye, and slid out, and ran down into the pillow, and he did not move to wipe it.

"I'm here," said Sienna.

"I know." He turned his face into her palm. "I am looking at you. It is not a thing I ever thought I should be allowed to do."

She lay still and let him. And she felt it again, cold and small and clear, the question that she had said she would ask in the morning. It lay at the back of her mind. It was nearly morning. The window was graying. She could ask now, in the gentle quiet, with his face in her hand.

She did not.

She drew his head down onto her shoulder instead, and held him, and felt his arms come round her in the half dark. She told herself that she would ask when the sun was up. She told herself she would ask over coffee. She was a woman who could not leave a question alone, and she lay in the first light with a man who had been waiting two years to be looked at, and left it.