I don’t know how long we sat like that, but I felt his eyes roam my face as mine roamed his. Nothing obscured us, no polite gestures clung. We were naked.

When our eyes finally met, it was as if we had journeyed together and come home more familiar. He released me and reached for the satchel. A subtle tremor made his fingers clumsy with the buckles. If I hadn’t been sure before, I knew then what the satchel held.

But it was not what I expected.

He pulled out a parcel. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string: the signature wrapping of the Press. It was the dimensions of a ream of paper, though thinner.

“For you,” he said, offering the parcel.

“Not proofs, surely.”

“Proof, of sorts,” he said.

I released the bow and the thick paper fell away.

It was a beautiful object, leather-bound and gold-lettered. It must have cost Gareth a month’s wages. Women’s Words and Their Meanings was embossed on the green leather in the same typeface used for the Dictionary volumes. I opened to the first page where the title was repeated. Below that, Edited by Esme Nicoll.

It was a thin volume, and the type was larger than that of Dr. Murray’s dictionary—two columns on each page instead of three. I turned to the letter C and let my finger trace the familiar shapes of the words, each one a woman’s voice. Some smooth and genteel, others, like Mabel’s, gravelly and coated in phlegm. Then I came to it, one of the first words I ever wrote on a slip. To see it in print was exhilarating. The limerick fluttered across my lips.

Was it more obscene to say it, to write it, or to set it in type? On the breath it could be taken by a breeze or crowded out by chatter; it could be misheard or ignored. On the page it was a real thing. It had been caught and pinned to a board, its letters spread in a particular way so that anyone who saw it would know what it was.

“What must you have thought of me!” I said.

“I was glad to finally know what it meant,” he said, his earnest face collapsing into a grin.

I kept turning the pages.

“It took a year, Es. And every day that I held a slip with your handwriting, I came to know you better. I fell in love with you word by word. I’ve always loved the shape and feel of them, the infinite pairings. But you showed me their limitations, and their potential.”

“But how?”