Ruby turned and looked at him.
The question had come out before he had decided to ask it arrived on its own, from the same place the evening had been arriving from, from the part of him that had spent three years accumulating small specific memories of her and was now, in this house, finding them closer to the surface than they had been anywhere else.
"Dance?" she said.
The surprise in her voice was genuine. Not unpleasant, just the surprise of a word arriving from an unexpected direction.
"You used to love dancing," Max said.
He said it simply. Not with the weight of grief or the pressure of trying to make her remember something. Just as a fact. The way you tell someone something true about themselves when they have temporarily mislaid it.
Ruby looked at him for a moment.
"Well," she said. "I don't remember myself dancing."
"You used to dance in the rain," Max said.
