“A few slips at a time, and I was always careful to put them back just where I’d found them. Half the Press were in on it by the end. I wanted a hand in every part of it, not just the typesetting. I chose the paper and worked the press. I cut the pages, and the women in the bindery fell over themselves to show me how to put it all together.”

“I bet they did.” I smiled.

“Fred Sweatman was my lookout at the Scrippy, but none of it would have been possible without Lizzie. She knows your every move and all your hiding places. Don’t be cross with her for giving them away.”

I thought about the shoebox in my desk and the trunk under Lizzie’s bed. My Dictionary of Lost Words. She was its custodian, I realised. And she’d wanted the words to be found.

“I could never be cross with Lizzie,” I said.

Gareth took my hands again. The tremor in his was gone. “I had to choose,” he said. “Between a ring and the words.”

I looked at my dictionary, traced the title with my fingers and heard the words on my breath. I imagined a ring on my hand and was glad for its absence. I wondered how it was possible to feel so much.

No more words passed between us. He didn’t ask, and I didn’t answer, but I felt those moments like the rhythm of a poem. They were the preface to everything that would come after, and already I was plotting it out. I held his face, felt it differently against the skin of each hand, then brought it near. His lips were warm against mine, the taste of tea still pleasant on his tongue. His hand on the small of my back asked nothing, but I leaned in, wanting him to feel the shape of me. The flan cooled and remained uneaten.

“Where is it, then?” asked Lizzie when I came into the kitchen.

We both looked at my hand, as unadorned as it always had been.

“Is there anything you don’t know, Lizzie Lester?”

“A whole lot, but I know he loves you and you love him, and I thought I’d find a ring on that finger when you came back from your picnic.”

I took the thin volume from my own satchel and put it on the kitchen table in front of her. “He gave me something far more precious than a ring.”

Smiling, she wiped her hands on her apron, then checked them before touching the leather. “I knew the words would win you, all bound and beautiful. I told him as much when he showed me. Then he showed me where my own name was printed and made me a cup of tea while I blubbered.” Tears sprang again and she wiped them quickly away. “But he never said he had no ring.”