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“He was mine first,” she says. “Two-and-a-half years. Most of high school and the first year of college.” A pause. “I thought he was it. I know how that sounds. I know I was eighteen, but I thought — I had it in my head that we were building toward something. And then Maddison slept with him.”

I don’t say anything.

“I found out the way you find out,” she says. “All at once. And too late.” She’s quiet for a moment, her hand still against my chest. “My parents said they loved both their girls equally. That they weren’t going to take sides. That family was family.” Another pause, and this one has a different weight to it. “Which is — I know they meant it. The love is real. I’m not — I’ve never once doubted that they love me.” She stops. Starts again. “But I’d just found out my sister slept with my boyfriend, and my parents looked at both of us like we were equal parts of the same problem. And somehow that was the part that finished something. Not Maddison. Not Michael. The neutral. The careful equal distance of two people who decided that love means not choosing.”

She stops talking.

I don’t fix it. I don’t tell her they were wrong, though they were. I don’t tell her Michael isn’t worth the weight of it, though he isn’t. I just hold her in her pink childhood room with the four-poster behind us and I say the only true thing I have.

“You’re not alone.”

Into her hair. Low. Not for the room — there is no room. Just for her.

She’s still for a moment. Then she pulls back enough to look at me. Her eyes are dry — of course they are, she’s Margo, she managed the tears somewhere between Georgia and South Carolina. But the look in them is the real one. The one that only comes out in the dark or in rooms with no audience.

I hold her jaw in one hand. I tip her face up. And I kiss her.

Not the hotel kind. Not the library kind. Not the midnight-in-somebody’s-kitchen, hand-at-the-back-of-her-head kind that’s been the whole register of us for three months. I’ve had my hands on this woman in every room we could find and I know her body the way I know the ice — by feel, by instinct, by the specific weight of each moment. But this is different.

This is just her mouth. Her lips parting under mine, slow. The warmth of her, specific and close, her exhale when I deepen it — unhurried, her tongue moving against mine like she’s not trying to get anywhere, like she just wants to stay here. My thumb at her jaw. Her hands pressed against my chest. The whole room quiet around us, her childhood house, the pink walls, the four-poster behind her, the Atlantic three hundred yards away.

I’ve kissed her hungry and urgent and with the particular desperation of two people who only had twenty minutes. I’ve kissed her half-asleep and I’ve kissed her when neither of us had a reason to stop. But I haven’t kissed her like this — just to be here, just because she needed someone to be, just because I wanted to feel the weight of her in the middle of something that hurt her and couldn’t be fixed.

She makes a small sound against my mouth. Not the sounds I know from hotel rooms. Something quieter. Something that costs her more.

I feel it in my whole chest.

When we pull apart, she looks at me for a second with the expression I never quite have words for. Not the bright version. Not the managed version. Just her — quiet and real, before she has to put it all back on.

“Okay,” she says. Small.

“Yeah,” I say.

She steps back. She goes to her bag — still where I set it beside the bed — and pulls out the dinner clothes. I find what I brought: the dress shirt, the dark jeans that will have to be enough. We change on opposite sides of the bed without discussing it, the choreography of two people who know each other’s bodies and have been in close quarters enough to move around each other.

She’s in a cream silk blouse and tailored dark trousers, her hair down now, the gold hoops back in. Every piece of the Charleston daughter assembled back into place. She turns her back to me for the zipper. I pull it up. She turns back around and smooths the front. Then she looks at the collar of my dress shirt, which has done something inconvenient in transit, and she reaches up without asking and fixes it.

Both of us. Quietly. Like we’ve done this before, and we haven’t, and we both know it, and neither of us says so.

“Ready,” she says. More to herself than me.

“Ready,” I agree.

The dining room is the kind of room that takes itself seriously.

Long mahogany table, six places set, the candles already lit, the caterer’s people moving through with the quiet efficiency of professionals. Caroline Ashby does not cook when she can host properly, and she can always host properly. There are passed appetizers first — stone crab claws with a mustard aioli, little crab cakes that are mostly crab and very little cake, the kind of thing you serve to people who know the difference. Then we’re seated and the first course arrives: a chilled She-crab soup, finished with cream and a splash of sherry, in wide shallow bowls. The kind of dish that announces the coast without having to announce it.

The table seats six. Margo and I on one side. Maddison and Michael opposite. Caroline at the head nearest the kitchen, Richard at the other end.

I look at the positioning and I think: center ice. Two lines facing each other.

I know how this kind of game goes. I know which side has the pressure and where it’s going to come from.

Maddison glows across the table. She’s been glowing since we came downstairs — a specific radiance that I have now identified as the radiance of a person with news. She keeps catching Michael’s eye and looking away. Michael looks at ease the way a person looks at ease when they’ve practiced it. He eats well, makes conversation, asks about my hockey, and I answer in enough words to be polite and not one more.

“What team do you want to end up with?” he asks. The tone of one athlete to another.

“Bruins,” I say.