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“I watched you do this,” he says, sounding, for possibly the first time since I’ve known him, genuinely uncertain of himself. “At the shop. You spread something onto bread and gave it to a customer and they seemed pleased.”

“That’s true,” I say. “I did do that.”

“I believed I understood the principle,” he says.

“You understood most of the principle,” I say, gently, sitting down at the table across from him. “You’ve got the sandwich part exactly right. Two slices, pressed together. You just put the spreading on the wrong side. It needs to go inside, between the two pieces, not on top like you’re decorating it.”

He looks at the toast again, at the peanut butter sitting proudly on top, and something crosses his face that I’ve genuinely never seen there before. Not quite embarrassment, shadow beings possibly being above something so ordinary as embarrassment, but close to it. Close enough that I feel my chest go warm and aching all at once.

“It is wrong,” he says.

“It’s completely wrong,” I say. “It’s also the nicest thing anyone’s done for me all week.”

“You do not have to say that to spare my feelings,” he says.

“I’m not sparing anything. I mean it.” I reach across and break off a corner of the peanut buttery toasted not-sandwich, and discover there’s peanut butter on the bottom too, though most of it is stuck to the plate.

I eat it properly, crust and all, sticky and slightly absurd. “It’s delicious. Wrong, but delicious. Ten out of ten. I’ll be recommending Coffeelicious hire you immediately.”

“I do not think that is a genuine offer,” he says.

“No,” I admit, “but you get the sentiment.”

He watches me eat the rest of it with an expression I can’t entirely name, something caught between relief and disbelief. Like he expected this small, ordinary failure to matter more than it does. Like he thought wrongness might cost him something.

“Nobody’s ever made me toast before,” I tell him, once I’ve finished, because it feels important to say out loud. “Not like this. Not because they wanted to, just because.”

“That seems unlikely,” he says. “You are extremely easy to want to feed.”

“High praise,” I say.

“It is simply true,” he says.

We sit there for a while, mugs cooling, the last of the daylight fading properly outside the window. I think about how strange it is that a fortnight ago he could barely bring himself to sit fully visible in a room. Now here he is, entirely solid, entirely present, having made me objectively terrible toast out of nothing but wanting to. Somehow that’s turned into one of the loveliest evenings I can remember having.

“Can I ask you something?” I say, once the light’s gone properly and I’ve switched the little lamp on instead of the harsh overhead one, softening the kitchen into something almost cosy.

“You may ask anything,” he says.

“Doesn’t mean you’ll answer,” I say.

“No,” he agrees. “It does not.”

“Fair enough.” I turn my mug slowly on the table, watching the tea leave a faint ring on the wood I’ll have to remember to wipe up before Hannah gets back. “Did you always look like this, or is this just what you’ve decided to look like for me?”

He’s quiet long enough that I think he might not answer at all, which would be entirely fair, given the size of the question I’ve just handed him with not enough warning.

“I have looked many ways,” he says eventually. “This is not decided. It simply is, when I am solid enough to hold a shape at all. I do not fully understand why it is this shape, specifically, rather than another.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, I highly approve of the choice,” I say.

“It was not a choice,” he says.

“I know,” I say. “But I still think it’s amazing.”

Something that might be amusement flickers across his face, there and gone. He picks up his own mug of tea, turning it in his hands like he’s still working out what to do with holding something so small and ordinary.

“Thank you,” I say, quietly, “for coming in properly.”