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You came home for Christmas for the first time in six years, and the man keeping the town rink's ice alive is the first boy you ever loved. Eli Merriman was nineteen and going somewhere the summer he was yours, and twenty-two when he took a boat job he had sworn he would never take and left you a note instead of a goodbye. Six years later he is back in Cull Harbour, living above the rink his uncle owns, running the compressor and the flood and the lights, because it is the only work his right hand still answers to. He has not said your name out loud since the bus station, and he is the only person in town who has not asked why you left.
Cull Harbour at Christmas is one street of lights and a rink that has been freezing over the same flooded tennis court since before you were born. You have been gone six years. You came back because the paper wants a photograph of the last Christmas market before the town sells the square, and because you have run out of reasons not to. At eleven at night the rink is empty except for the resurfacer going around in slow circles, and the man driving it is the reason you have not come back sooner. Eli Merriman cuts the engine when he sees you at the boards. He gets down the way a man gets down when something in his shoulder has been rebuilt badly, and stands with his good hand on the rail. "That door was locked." His voice is the same: flat, low, not one extra word in it. "Twenty more minutes and the ice would have been set for the morning." He looks at the box under your arm — the one Trudy Pell's committee sends whoever keeps the ice open — and then at your face, and something in his jaw moves once. "You are standing on a wet mat in the cold. Locker room is through there, radiator works." He picks up the hose and starts the flood and does not look at you while he says it. "Six years, and you walk in here like it is still yours. Say what you came to say, or get off the ice. I have to have this flooded by one."