"He's given us the blue one," Nina said. "Look at the bath."
"Mm."
"Jonah. Look at the bath."
He was at the window with his phone held up, turning slowly, the way he had been doing since the car.
They had been together four years and eight months and had a flat in Stoke Newington that her father had bought and that he paid nothing towards, which was a sentence neither of them had ever said out loud and both of them kept ready.
She came up behind him and put her hands under his jumper.
"There's no signal," he said.
"I know."
"It's mad. Not even one bar."
"Jonah."
He turned round. She had already taken her jumper off, and he made the small assessing pause he always made, as though her body were a thing he was deciding to buy again, and then he put his hands on her and it went the way it had gone for two years, which was quickly and competently and with the light on, and afterwards he lay on his back and looked at the ceiling.
It had not been bad. It was never bad. It was simply that she had begun, at some point she could not locate, to be able to think about other things all the way through, and tonight she thought about Saskia saying is it at dinner, and the particular way the room had gone.
"That was nice," Jonah said.
"Mm."
He got up and went and picked up his phone again.
She watched him from the bed with the duvet round her.
"Who are you expecting to hear from?"
"Nobody."
"You've had that phone in your hand since Perth."
"I'm on call."
"You're a project manager."
"Nina."
"You're a project manager for a company that builds retail parks," she said, "and it is half past one on a Friday in February," and he laughed, and came back to the bed, and kissed the top of her head in the way that had once meant you've caught me being ridiculous and had lately come to mean stop.
At two she got up for water.
The landing light was off but the hall below was lit, and Emil was standing at the long window at the bottom of the stairs with his back to her, not doing anything at all. Just standing. Looking out at the dark where the mountain was.
She watched him for a while, and he did not move, and she found after a minute that she did not want him to know she was there, and she could not have said why.
She went back to bed without the water.