He had already chosen her room.
She worked that out standing in the doorway of it with her bag still in her hand, because somebody had put a lamp on the table by the bed, and a jug of water, and made the bed up with a spare blanket folded across the end of it, and none of that happens by accident three hours north of anywhere.
"This one's yours," Adrian said, behind her.
"You picked it."
"I picked it in August." He nodded at the corner. "That door goes through to my room."
Nora looked at the door.
"There's a bolt on your side," he said. "There's one on mine as well, and I've taken it off, and it stays off. I'd like to say the rest of this badly and quickly, if that's all right."
"Go on."
"You are about to live in a house three hours from a town with a man you met in a bar four days ago." He said it flatly, the way he said everything that mattered. "If you hear something in the night. If you can't sleep. If you simply want to know that there is a person twelve feet away — you open your side and you don't knock. Mine will never be locked. That's the whole of it."
"And if I bolt mine?"
"Then you bolt it," Adrian said. "It's yours. That's rather the point of the arrangement."
He went to get the rest of her bags.
Nora stood in the middle of a room she had not chosen and discovered that she liked it — that it had two doors, and that she could see both of them from the bed without sitting up, and that in four months of standing behind curtains nobody had once thought to give her a second way out of anywhere.
She bolted her side that night.
She would go on bolting it every night for two weeks, and lying there afterwards knowing that his was not bolted, and that a bolt only works from one side at a time.
He cooked, badly, and she let him.
That was the first evening: a man worth two hundred million standing over a pan of something that had started as an ambition and become a compromise, while she sat on the counter and did not offer to help, because she had worked out that he needed a job.
"You don't have staff here?"
"Not in the house. Not unless my mother's coming." He turned the pan down. "I had a nanny for fourteen years who used to make this. I've never once got it right and I keep trying, and I've never told anyone that, and I have no idea why I've told you."
"Because I signed fourteen pages."
"Yes," Adrian said. "That'll be it."
Outside, a car door slammed.
Nora was off the counter and against the wall beside the window before she registered moving, with her heart going like something caught in a net, and the worst part — the part she would still be angry about in the morning — was that she had made a sound.
Adrian did not come toward her. He stayed exactly where he was, both hands on the pan.
"Grocery delivery," he said, perfectly level. "Tuesdays and Fridays. He leaves it at the gate and he slams the door because the latch is broken and he's been asked nine times."
Nora stood with her back to the wall and her palms flat against it.
"Nine times," she said.
"I'll make it ten."
She laughed, and it came out shaking, and he turned back to the pan and gave her the ninety seconds she needed by pretending very hard about an onion.
Nobody is coming, she told herself, with her palms flat against the wall. Nobody is coming, there is no car, the man is stirring an onion. Your body has not read the memo.
She did not take the ninety seconds.
She crossed the kitchen instead and stood next to him at the stove, closer than the room required, near enough that her shoulder was against his arm — and she stayed there, looking at a pan she had no interest in, until her heart came back down.
Adrian Cole did not move away and did not mention it and did not stop stirring. But he was not stirring anything by then, and both of them knew it.
Later, going up, she stopped on the stairs.
"Clause nine," she said. "The couch. You said you'd slept on it."
"I have."
"When?"
Adrian Cole stood at the bottom of his great-grandfather's staircase with a tea towel over his shoulder.
"Most of last year," he said, and turned the lights off.