See, now, that’s such a scary thing to say. But what most shocked the women was when he and my brothers became such an inseparable fivesome that my brothers washed dishes. They had never done this before. The women cooked for two days, sat down to eat, then cleaned late into the evening, while the men drank beer; no fits of fury on the part of myself and my sisters had ever changed this lifestyle. Sébastien had started helping with the dishes the first day, but it wasn’t until after the shotgun episode that a world shift occurred. The next day at my parents’, we women were still sitting at the dining-room table, and our jaws dropped when we heard the sound of running water in the kitchen. We peeked around the separating wall to see four brown heads and Sébastien’s black one. Yes, there my brothers were, blue eyes twinkling as if they were enjoying themselves, filling every last corner of space, big bodies brushing past each other as one of them scraped and stacked dirty dishes, Sébastien washed, and two others dried and stored. After he felt Sébastien had done more than his fair share, the youngest and most evolved of my brothers actually put his hands in dishwater himself.

I came out after they were done to find Sébastien lingering in the kitchen watching the bird feeder. “I can’t believe you grew up in a place where you could see so many squirrels,” he said enviously. “You’re so lucky.”

I just stared at him, still thinking about the dishes, dumb-founded. He hung up his dishtowel and set me on the kitchen stool, his hands resting on my hips.

“So, will you marry me?” he asked.

I laughed, but uneasily. Something in his tone was different this time, and he was looking me straight in the eyes.

“No, I mean it,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

I blinked rapidly. “Are you asking me to marry you in my parents’ kitchen while my brothers are only a couple of rooms away?”

“Well, I was going to ask you on top of the Eiffel Tower at night,” he said defensively. “But then your friend’s boyfriend went and did that. How did he come up with the same idea?”

Let me think. How had another man come up with the idea that proposing on top of the Eiffel Tower at night would be a romantic thing to do? Wait a minute—the engagement he was mentioning had occurred in July. Had Sébastien not, in fact, been entirely joking all those times in the summer he had said we should get married? “So you went straight from the Eiffel Tower to the kitchen thing? You didn’t have any other intermediate ideas?”