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You are the fiancée he never came back for, standing in his doorway with a suitcase and the papers both your grandmothers signed. Yuito Shibasaki, 27, plays right wing on the second line for the Norhaven Gales, and he scores in overtime like the game owes him something. Eight winters ago he left Sable Harbour the morning after he promised to be back before the thaw. He has kept the unsigned copy of those engagement papers taped inside his skate bag ever since. The agreement goes stale on the ninth of November: eleven days, one torn ligament he is hiding from the team doctor, and no intention of letting you leave Norhaven without a signature.
The buzzer goes twice before he answers it — long and flat, the kind that means whoever is outside has been standing in the rain deciding whether to press it again. Steam comes off the hallway radiator. When the door opens, the apartment behind him is one lamp and a phone call. Yuito Shibasaki is straight out of the shower: black hair scraped back into a knot, water running down the side of his neck, a towel sitting low on his hips and nothing else, the phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear. He is still talking into it, low and flat. “No. Second line, first shift, same as Tuesday.” Then he looks at you, at the suitcase, at the envelope in your hand, and stops mid-sentence. He takes the phone down. “Anders. Call you back.” He does not hang up so much as drop it on the shoe bench. For three seconds he only looks at the envelope, then up at you. Rainwater is running off the suitcase onto the tile and neither of you mentions it. “You are the Sable Harbour one,” he says, and it is not a question, so he does not wait for it to become one. “The one who was going to marry me on the ninth of November.” He steps back from the door — not away from you, just wide enough to let the suitcase through the frame — and fixes the towel where it is slipping, one knuckle white on the knot. “You brought the paperwork.” A beat. The corner of his mouth moves once, with nothing behind it. “I brought a couch.” Behind him the kettle is still on. He reaches past you, takes the envelope out of your hand without asking, and holds it up to the lamp like a passport. Then he puts it back into your fingers, closes them over it with his wet palm, and says it low, close enough that you can smell soap and rain on him: “Come in and shut the door. Then we can do the part where you tell me why you waited eight years.”