"I am Swedish," I reminded her. "We sit in gardens in the rain too. We just don't talk about it. We stare at the water and think about death... and life, mind you"

"How romantic." She tore a Welsh cake in half and pushed the bigger piece toward me. The sugar left a pale trail across the table. "Is that what you're thinking about now? Death?"

"No," I said, and I meant it. "I'm thinking about how your hair does that thing when it's damp. Like it can't decide if it wants to be curly or straight, so it just does both at the same time. Like it's arguing with itself."

She reached up and touched the side of her head, self-conscious for half a second before the smile broke through. "That's not romantic either, you know. You're supposed to say it looks like a waterfall or a sunset or something."

"It looks like a argument," I said. "A beautiful argument. The kind where both sides are right and nobody wins, but everyone is better for having it."

She stared at me, her lemonade halfway to her lips. "That might be the most you thing you've ever said."

"I have more."

"God help us."

The rain intensified, hammering the awning above us and filling the garden with a white noise that made the rest of Cardiff disappear. We were in a bubble—a canvas-and-stone capsule where the only things that existed were the two of us, the sugar on the table, and the steady percussion of water on fabric.

She pulled her sketchbook from her bag—she carried it everywhere now, like a second skin—and began to draw. I watched her hands move, the pencil scratching in quick, confident strokes. She was drawing me. Or rather, she was drawing the version of me that existed in her mind—slightly softer around the edges, the jaw less sharp, the eyes wider. It was the way she saw me when she wasn't trying to see me, and it made my chest ache in a way I didn't have the English for.

"Hold still," she murmured. "You keep moving your mouth."

"I'm breathing."

"Breathe less dramatically, then. You're ruining the composition."

I held still, watching her eyes flick between me and the page. In those moments—when she was drawing, when the pencil was the only thing tethering her to the present—she was the most whole version of herself I ever saw. No fog. No drift. Just her, entirely, the way the rain was entirely rain.

"Can I see?" I asked when her hand finally slowed.

She turned the sketchbook around. It was me, sitting in the garden chair, but she'd drawn the ivy growing across my shoulders and into my hair, as if the wall behind me was slowly claiming me. It was tender and strange and slightly unsettling.

"You've made me look like a plant," I said.