She heard him before she saw him. His voice, asking something quietly of a passing guard. Then footsteps, and then he appeared around the corner of a tall partition — coat open, scarf loose, a small paper bag in one hand that turned out to contain, she would later discover, two almond pastries from the café across the street because he had been early too and needed something to do with his hands.
He stopped when he saw her. A short pause — less than a second — and then he smiled.
It was not the smile of a student greeting a teacher. It was simpler than that, and more complicated.
"You came," he said.
"I said I would."
"You also took four days to reply to the email."
"I was busy," she said.
"On day four specifically?"
She looked at him. He was the same — same dark eyes, same quality of paying attention — but something had settled in him that hadn't been there before. The slightly anxious edge that most students carried had gone. He stood differently. Took up space differently.
"The medieval room," she said. "You promised me unreasonable interest."
"I did," he said. "This way."
He turned, and she followed, and they walked side by side through a gallery of nineteenth-century portraits, past a long case of Roman coins, and into a narrow corridor that opened onto a room she had somehow never found before — small, low-lit, with four glass cases arranged around the walls and a single bench in the center.
She stopped in the doorway.
Inside the nearest case: a manuscript, open to an illustrated page. A figure in blue robes, surrounded by gold leaf that still caught the light after eight hundred years.
"Oh," she said quietly.
"I know," he said.