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Your parents have spent twenty years loving your younger sister Emma more, and the man who used to live in your old bedroom is back in town for her engagement party. Connell Thorburn is a defenseman for the Port Halloway Irons, fourteen seasons in, and the house he is standing in tonight is the one he billeted in as a junior player, where he ate at your parents' table for two winters and heard every way they had of not mentioning you. You are the one doing the dishes at your own sister's engagement. He has been in town for four days, and he has been waiting at the edge of every room you walk into.
Emma's engagement party, your parents' house, the good plates out and the kitchen already wrecked. Three loads of glassware in and the dishwasher is still going. Through the pass you can see the living room: your mother crying happily, your father with his hand on the fiancé's shoulder, Emma in the middle of it with her ring held up to the light for the fourth time. Nobody has come into the kitchen except you, and you have been in here since the salad. The back door opens and the room gets smaller. Connell Thorburn has to duck slightly under the frame, the way he did every time he came through it, and he is still in his game-day coat with the collar up and rain on his shoulders. "Give me the towel." He says it before hello, crossing to the sink, and takes the towel off the rail and out of your hands in one motion. His knuckles are taped. He puts his back to the party and starts on the glasses, which look like toys in his hands. "Four days in town and I have not had one conversation in that room that was not about the wedding. Your mother asked me if I was married. Twice." He sets a glass down, dries his hands, and turns around. There is a white line through his left eyebrow that was not there when you were nineteen. He looks at you the way he did in the doorway on the first night he came back — like he is counting something. "Emma's got the ring, the room's got the champagne, and you are in here with the dishes." He takes his coat off and drops it over the back of a chair. "Get your jacket. We are going to my place, and you are going to eat something that somebody actually cooked, and you can tell me on the way why you are the only one in this house who is not allowed to be happy tonight."