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Tristan had brought the wrong book. He discovered it three pages in, when Lydia asked why the traveler was suddenly smaller than the inhabitants of the country. He checked the cover, then glanced at the volume he had left on the neighboring table.

“I appear to have offered you a voyage without consulting its destination.”

“A bold method of navigation.”

“My father considered it the only honorable one.”

She laughed and set aside the letter she had sealed. Rain tapped at the window. Someone had lit a fire, because the evening had turned cold enough to make summer feel like a broken promise. Lydia pulled her chair nearer and left the botanical books on the table between them, and it pleased Tristan that she no longer waited to see whether he would make room before she put something there.

“Did he read to you?” she asked.

“Badly. He gave every sailor the same voice and forgot which one was speaking. My mother refused to hear it after the first evening.”

“And you?”

“I thought all sailors naturally sounded alike.”

“You must have been sorely disappointed when you met one.”

He marked the page with a finger. He remembered his father’s voice more clearly than he expected, the determined growl he gave admirals, pirates, and cabin boys alike. For years Tristan had kept that memory with a chair no one used and a shelf of books no one opened. Now he watched Lydia by the fire and could almost hear her disputing a passage with his father.

“He would have liked you,” he said.

She raised her head. “Enough to endure objections to his sailors?”

“He enjoyed an objection far more than agreement. Provided he had time to think of his reply.”

“Then I should have liked him too.”

He read on. She drew her feet up beneath the hem of her gown and watched the flames. After a few minutes he forgot to listen to his own voice. Nothing had moved except her chair, yet the room felt smaller and warmer for it, and he read past the place where he meant to stop, caught himself, and kept going.

“One day you might read that to our child,” she said.

He stopped in the middle of a sentence. Lydia turned from the fire. She had spoken without weighing the words; now her feet went down onto the carpet.

“Forgive me. I was thinking of what you said about your father.”

He kept his finger on the page. The child in her sentence had been scarcely more than a listener, a small person beside a hearth. In his mind it became a room upstairs and a physician coming out without meeting his eyes. He hated how little invitation that memory needed. He had told her everything on the floor of her bedroom. He had let her hold him while he wept. He had lain with her since, fully, as a husband, and every time afterward he had lain awake doing arithmetic he despised himself for, counting weeks. None of it had made the memory slower to come. It came now, in the warm room with the rain on the glass, and his hand went cold on the book.

“I did not mean to upset you,” she said.

“I know.”

She reached for the sealed letter, found nothing to do with it, and left her hand on the table. He knew the maneuver. She had learned it from him.

Tristan closed the book. “Do not stop imagining a future because I am afraid of it.”

Lydia held still. The rain sounded louder now that he had stopped reading. He kept his eyes on the fire and let the sentence stand long enough to hear it himself.

“Do you mean that?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You need not say it because you think you have spoiled the evening.”

He shook his head. “I was thinking about the physician. You were thinking about a story. I would rather you kept your thought than borrowed mine.”

She came to sit on the edge of his chair. He put an arm around her so she would not slip, and she settled against him with more care than usual. She had understood the effort, and he was grateful that she did not congratulate him for it. He turned his face into her hair. He had said it, and meant it, and it had frightened him to the bone. A month ago, he would not have said it at all. A month ago, he had had nothing in his life worth fearing for.