Matteo Bellandi woke at ten minutes to five, as he had woken every morning for three and a half years, and for the first time in all of them he did not reach for the notebook.

That was the habit. A hand going out in the dark toward the nightstand, the pen, the lamp, the small black book with its cloth spine, so that whatever the night had left in him could be written down before it went. He lay with his arm half lifted and found that there was nothing it needed to do. The room was gray and soft. The balcony door had been left open a hand's breadth, and the curtains moved in a thread of cold air that smelled of the sea and of wet lilac. On the pillow beside his, a yard of dark hair lay loose across the linen, and under it, slow and even, a woman was breathing.

He did not move. He had learned a great deal about quiet in the last two years, and he used all of it now. He lay on his side and looked at her. She slept as she did everything, with a certain stubborn thoroughness, one fist curled under her chin and the other hand flung out across the coverlet, palm up. On the third finger of it, a plain gold band caught the gray light. He knew what was cut inside it. He had stood at a jeweler's counter on Calloway Street the afternoon before, with the sleeves of his shirt turned back and his heart going like a boy's, and watched a man with a loupe engrave five words in a space the width of a thread. It had taken twenty minutes. He had not looked at a clock once.

She did not wake. He thought, with a sort of dazed gratitude, that she looked younger asleep than she ever had awake. Awake, she carried herself like someone crossing a room full of glass. Asleep, the line between her brows had gone, and her mouth had softened, and she looked like a person who had been told, at last, that she might put something down.

He lifted the bolt without a sound.

It had been shot on the inside, as it was every night, by her hand and not his. He eased it back an inch at a time, and the heavy iron slid in its keeper with a small oiled whisper, and he held his breath until it was done. He did not go out. He had meant only to hear it turn. He wished to know, in his own fingers, that it could be drawn from this side without a key and without a word, and that she had slept all night in a room that anyone who loved her could have opened. Then he slid it home again, gently, and crossed the carpet in his bare feet to the writing desk by the window.

The white notebook lay where he had left it, under the lamp, beside the old black one.

He sat down in the straight chair and drew the lamp's chain, and a small warm circle of light came up on the leather. He did not open the black book. He knew it too well. Every page of it was a record of a woman he had known for a single day in one life and for fourteen months at a distance in another, set down in a hand that shook: the color of her hair, the way she turned a ring when she was afraid, the weight of a dress, the taste of a glass. He had written it as a man writes a will. It had never occurred to him, in all the nights he had filled it, that there might be a book that was not an inventory.

He laid his palm flat on the white one and opened it.

The first page held a single word, written twice. The first was crossed out with a neat straight line, the pen pressed so hard that the paper had dimpled. The second stood beneath it, plain and upright and untouched. STAY. He looked at it for a while. He had written it in October, at this desk, with a pot of cold tea at his elbow, and had been so afraid of it that he had not slept.

He turned the page. It was clean and white and smelled very faintly of the stationer's on Calloway Street. He uncapped the pen.

He sat for some minutes without writing. It was an odd sensation. For three and a half years his hand had known exactly what to do with a blank page, which was to fill it with everything he was afraid of losing. Now there was nothing to lose that he could write down. She was asleep ten feet away, with a ring on her finger and a boat in the cove and a pear tree, God help him, in the east border. He did not know what a man put in a book when he was not afraid.

After a while he wrote a heading.

Things I do not know yet.

He looked at it. It seemed to him the truest thing he had ever put on paper. Then, slowly, he began the list.

What she hums when she believes that no one can hear. (Not the herring song. Something else, lower, in the bath.)

Whether she will want a dog.

What she was like at nine.

Which of us will be the first to fall asleep in front of the fire when we are old, and whether it will be me.

How she will look at forty. At sixty. I should like to be there for the whole of it, and I do not know how to ask for that without sounding like a man making a claim.

What the pear will taste like in four years.

What she will call the first child, if there is one, and whether she will let me suggest anything. (She will not. I should not.)

Whether she will ever, truly, stop counting.

He stopped. His hand had begun to ache in the old place, across the back where the skin had healed from the fire, and he flexed it, and found that it was warm. He read the last line over, and a smile came up in him that he did not trouble to hide, because there was no one to see it. Then he added one more.

What she is going to say when she wakes and finds me at this desk, which I suspect will be funny.

"You're writing," said Sienna.

He did not start. He had heard the bed creak a full minute before, and the long soft rustle of linen, and had gone on writing with a careful assumption of absorption that deceived neither of them. He turned in the chair.

She was sitting up against the pillows with the sheet pulled to her shoulders and her hair standing out on one side like a dandelion. Her eyes were still heavy with sleep. She was looking at him with her chin lowered and her head a little on one side, in the exact attitude with which she examined a result that she meant to believe, and the sight of it went through him like warm water.

"I am," said Matteo.

"What?"

"Questions." He cleared his throat. "I find that I have a great many."

"May I read it?"

He opened his mouth to say that she never needed to ask, and shut it again. She had said it so lightly, with such a small crooked shadow of mischief at the corner of her mouth, that he understood at once she was not asking out of any doubt. She was giving him back his own word, as a person hands back a thing that has been lent, with the corners a little worn from use.

"Yes," he said. "Please."

She held out her hand. He crossed the carpet, and sat on the edge of the bed, and put the white notebook into it, and she read it. It took her a long time. She read with her lips slightly parted and a finger moving down the margin, as she would have read a protocol, and he watched her face, and she did not once look up. At the item about the dog her mouth twitched. At the one about forty her breath caught, and she was quiet for the space of two or three heartbeats, and then she went on.

She came to the last line, and laughed. It was a startled, cracked, delighted laugh, and she put her hand over her mouth.

"It is funny," she said. "You were right. It's extremely funny."

"I did say."

"You didn't say. You wrote it down. In ink." She lowered her hand. Her eyes were bright and wet. "You made a list of the things you don't know about me, and you wrote it in a book, and you put a joke at the bottom."

"It seemed the right place for it."

"Give me the pen."

He gave it to her. She drew her knees up under the sheet and propped the book against them, and bent over it, and began to write underneath his list in her small hard upright capitals. He did not read over her shoulder. He sat with his hands loose on his knees and looked at the line of her cheek, at the faint pink crease the pillow had left, and the sun came up over the cliff behind the curtains and laid a bar of pale gold across the coverlet.

She finished. She held the book out. He took it with a hand that was not quite steady.

She had answered the first one. Under What she hums, she had written, in capitals, A song my mother sang over the dishes. It has no words. I have never told anyone. And under the dog, Yes. A large stupid one. And under the child, with no hesitation at all, I will let you suggest one thing. You may not have a vote.

At the bottom of the page, below his joke, she had written one more line, and drawn a box round it.

Ask me. I will tell you the rest.

He read it twice. Then he lifted his eyes. She was watching him with her chin on her knees and her ring catching the light, and the line between her brows had not come back.

"That is the other half of the ring," said Matteo, hoarsely.

"I know. I read it yesterday." She smiled. "I read it with a magnifier, while you were putting on your shirt."

He laughed. He could not help it. It came up out of him like water out of a spring, helpless and bright, and he put his hand over his eyes. When he took it away, she had shifted over on the bed and lifted the corner of the coverlet, plainly, without any ceremony, in the manner of a person making room on a bench.

"May I?" he said.

"You may ask me," said Sienna, "as often as you like. I find that I enjoy it."

He got in. She put her head on his shoulder, and the white notebook lay open on his chest, and the sun climbed up the wall. In the garden below, a blackbird began to sing. And a long way down the house, in the kitchen, he heard a heavy pan set on a stove with a certain deliberate loudness, which meant that a stout woman in black had decided it was a decent hour to be about.

"What was the first one?" said Sienna drowsily. "On the list. I'd like to start at the beginning."

"What you hum in the bath."

"I told you."

"You did." He turned his face into her hair. "I shall want to hear it."

"I'll think about it," said Sienna, and fell asleep again with her hand open on his heart.