"Thank you," she said. "For tonight."
"I should be thanking you. She doesn't fall asleep on just anybody."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It's the highest one we've got."
She was standing on the top step, and he was standing on the porch, so for once they were nearly the same height. She looked at him and he looked at her, and she thought, quite clearly, in English, which was not the language she usually thought in when it mattered: I am going to remember this for the rest of my life.
He kissed her. Or she kissed him; she was never afterward entirely sure, and when she asked him, later, he said it had been a joint operation. It was a careful kiss, at first, the kind you give someone when you are both too old and too bruised to be careless, and then it was not careful at all, and his hands were cold on her face and hers were inside his vest, and somewhere behind them in the house a floorboard creaked and neither of them cared.
When it was over he put his forehead against hers.
"Well," he said. "That's going to cost me."
"I thought you didn't charge."
"I don't. I didn't say anything about what it'd cost me."
She should have told him then. She knew it, standing on the porch with his breath on her face and the stars wheeling over Coldwater. She opened her mouth to tell him, and what came out was "Good night," and she went down the steps and across the dark yard and down the hill toward the green, and she did not look back, because if she had looked back she would have gone back, and she was not yet sure whether that was a thing she was allowed to do.
He found out on Wednesday.
It was her own fault. She had been looking for the tape in the glove box, because Georgie wanted to hear herself on it, and the long cream envelope with the blue UN emblem had come out with it and fallen onto the floor of the bay, and Luc had picked it up and handed it back to her, and he had seen the word Genève, and he had seen her face.