David is making dinner when Patrick comes home. The kitchen smells like garlic and wine and the ordinary domestic texture of four years together.

Patrick has been thinking about this conversation for three weeks. Not planning it — thinking about it in the way you think about something you're not ready to do. Circling it. Finding reasons the timing isn't right.

The timing is never going to be right. He knows that. The concealment has been working practically — separate account, careful financial management, nothing David could find if he looked. What it's been doing psychologically is harder to itemize. The distance it creates. The specific quality of a shared life with a private room in it that David doesn't know exists.

He sits at the kitchen table. David is stirring something. Patrick says: I need to tell you something.

Two Kinds of Honest