The word hung in the air between us, enormous.

His face flushed a deep, instant red, and he looked away, mortified, as though he had broken something expensive.

Neither of us said anything for a long moment, and I understood that this was a delicate thing, that if I made too much of it I might frighten it back into hiding, and that if I made too little of it I might seem not to have noticed, not to have cared.

So I turned and pretended to rummage in a drawer, giving us both somewhere to look that was not each other’s faces, and I used the cover of it to wipe my eyes quickly with the back of my hand.