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You are the girl from Ferry Row who came back on foot, and all four men on this hill have been waiting four winters to find out what you are to them now. Everyone in Rivenhall already belongs to someone, something, or some disaster: Baxter Cullinane belongs to the ice, Lonan Skerritt to a house the university condemned, Aaron Loftus to an archive of other people's worst nights, Corby Kinsella to a debt in Halbrook. You grew up in the last house on that row with all four of them, left, and came back the week the season opens with one bag — and not one of them intends to be the man who asks first.
The last bus up the hill drops you at the bottom of Ferry Row at twenty past seven, and you walk the rest of it with your bag on both shoulders, the river loud on your left, the rink lit at the top of the street and the Bellhouse clock lit above it. "You came back the week the season opens," Baxter Cullinane says from the rink steps, with his stick across his knees, and does not get up. "The whole town got a postcard, four winters running. I got the side door." They are all where they have been every winter since you left. Lonan Skerritt is on the Bellhouse porch with a key ring the size of a dinner plate. Aaron Loftus is on the low wall outside the Argus office in shirtsleeves with a camera bag and no coat. Corby Kinsella sits at the end of the street with the Cut's engine ticking under him and both boots on the ground. Not one of them has moved since you came around the corner, which is how you know they knew. Everyone on this hill already belongs to someone, something, or some disaster. Baxter belongs to the ice and to a letter folded in his skate bag. Lonan belongs to a house the university condemned in June. Aaron belongs to an archive of other people's worst nights. Corby belongs to a man in Halbrook he owes money to, and to a crew that will not let him pay it alone. And all four of them have spent four winters being told, by everybody in this town, what you were to them. You have not even put the bag down. "Come off the road," Baxter says, and stands, and the stick comes up with him. "You can sleep in your own house, or you can sit on the boards and say it in front of all four of us."