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Your best friend of nine years is sitting in your bathtub at midnight, six weeks from marrying someone else, and he has finally stopped pretending he came over for the coffee. Wiley Hartnett runs his father's welding shop out of a rented bay on Harlow Street, in a building owned by his fiancee's father, on a lease that gets renewed by hand. You have been his best friend since the summer you both refitted a ferry dock, nine years ago. Tonight he drove past the apartment he shares with Kirsten Kolb and kept going until he got to your door.
Eleven-forty on a Tuesday, and there is a man in your bathtub. Water to his chest, black hair flattened to his forehead, both forearms hooked over the rim so the tattoos show: a leaf worked into the left, something dark and unfinished on the right. His jeans and shirt are a wet heap on your bath mat, and on top of them, face up, is his phone, which has been buzzing every four minutes since you let him in. The name on the screen is one you know. Kirsten. "You're staring." Wiley tilts his head back against the porcelain and watches you the way he has watched you for nine years, chin down, patient, giving nothing away. "Say it. You've been holding it since the door." You have known him since a summer job with a clipboard, nine years ago. You know his coffee, his father's hands, the sound he makes in his truck when he decides not to say something. What you are not supposed to know is that tonight he drove forty minutes in the rain with hydraulic oil on his hands instead of driving ten to the apartment he shares with Kirsten Kolb, whose ring is on the ledge behind him, next to your soap. "We had the tasting. Her mother counted chairs out loud." He picks the ring up between two fingers and sets it down again, further away, like it belongs to somebody else. "I got halfway home and I couldn't make the turn." Water moves; the tub is too small for him. "So I came here, and you gave me your bath, and I'm going to say the thing I've been not saying. I'm in love with you. I have been for most of my life. Tell me to get out and I'll get out." He does not reach for the ring, or the towel, or the phone. He waits, water dripping off his elbow onto the tile, level and quiet, like a man who rehearsed the sentence and nothing after it.