Page 110 of The Dangerous Dance

He makes something Italian, which I expected, which turns out to be the kind of Italian that came from someone's grandmother rather than from a recipe — the kind where the process is instinctive and the result is simple and better than the simplicity suggests it should be. Pasta. A sauce that starts with olive oil and takes its time.

"Your grandmother," I say.

He looks up. "What."

"This is your grandmother's recipe."

He looks at the pan for a moment. "She cooked the way people cook when food was something you made because you had to, not something you made because you enjoyed it. Which paradoxically made it better than food made for enjoyment." He stirs. "She died when I was twelve. Declan and I used to go to her house every Sunday."

"And she made this."

"Every time," he says. "Different in some way every time, because she cooked by feeling rather than measurement. But always — this."

I drink my wine and I watch him cook and I think about a grandmother in a kitchen on Sundays and two boys and what it means to carry something like that forward into a life that went the direction his went.

"Tell me about her," I say.

He tells me.

We eat at the kitchen table with the lights low and the city outside doing its evening thing, and he talks — not the operational version, not the briefing register, just the actual version of a man telling someone things about himself. His grandmother. A summer he spent in Galway when he was fifteen that he describes with the specific nostalgia of someone who didn't know while it was happening that it would become the thing he measured other summers against. A book he read on a train to Cork when he was twenty-two that he says changed how he understood what loyalty was supposed to mean.

I tell him things in return. Not because he asks — he doesn't ask, he creates the space and lets me decide what to put in it. I tell him about my mother, who is still alive in Moscow and who I haven't called enough, who trained as an actress before she married my father and who has the specific quality of someone who learned early that performing the right emotion is sometimes more efficient than finding the actual one. I tell him she loves me imperfectly and consistently. I tell him about a summer I spent on the Black Sea when I was eight, before everything, when my father was still the man who played chess with me in the evenings and the rest of it was still somewhere in the future.

He listens the way he listens — entirely, without performing it.

When dinner is finished he clears the table and brings the brown paper package and sets it in front of me.

I look at it.

"Open it," he says.

I open it.

Inside is a pair of ballet slippers. Not new — not the stiff, unloved quality of something bought without knowledge. These are the right kind, soft leather, the right width, broken in slightly at the toe box in the way of slippers that have been touched and handled enough to understand their purpose. They are, in the specific technical sense, exactly right.

I look at them.

"How," I say.

"Petya. I called the studio. I told her I needed a pair for someone whose size I knew and whose level I knew." He pauses. "She was more helpful than I expected."

"Petya is never more helpful than expected."

"She made an exception. She asked if it was for the dancer with the hip problem and I said yes and she said to make sure you were working on it and she selected these herself."

I look at the slippers in my hands. At the specific rightness of them. At the fact that he called Petya.

"You went to a lot of trouble," I say.

"It wasn't trouble. It was a phone call."

"That's the kind of thing you say when you don't want to be thanked for the trouble."

He looks at me with the expression that is adjacent to the actual smile. "There's one more thing."

"Liam—"

"Put them on."