He asked her in the courtyard.
It was December. Chicago in December was its most honest self — the cold that stopped being polite about it, the sky that specific white-grey of impending snow, the city in its winter quiet. She had been standing in the courtyard after dinner, looking up at the sky, because she had grown up in Chicago and the particular anticipation of the first snow was something that had survived all her adult practicality intact.
He came and stood beside her.
“What are you looking at?” he said.
“Waiting for snow,” she said.
He looked up. She watched him look — the quality of his attention, even on something as simple as a December sky, that particular focused steadiness.
“Aria,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Stay,” he said. Not the way he’d said it before — as a request, as a p
