They spent the remaining hours in the freer air that follows honesty, the air that tastes different once a kiss has been risked and not regretted. Claire told him about the first coat she ever bought with her own money—red, impractical, perfect, purchased on a lunch break when she still worked the sales floor and counted tips of advice instead of buyer budgets. She had worn it until the lining tore, then kept it in a closet like a vote she had once cast for herself. Samuel told her about the first table he built alone, wobbly on one leg, beloved anyway, still in his mother's kitchen under a bowl of plastic fruit that had outlasted several presidents and one marriage down the block. They made no grand promises. Grand promises belonged to cloth-napkin restaurants and violinists. They exchanged numbers on the backs of their punched paper tickets, ink bleeding slightly where her pen pressed too hard, his handwriting neat from labeling wood, hers stylish from labeling seasons. She gave him the Polaroid of their almost-touching hands; he gave her the one of himself looking dignified and ridiculous at once, the merry-train man preserved in chemical magic.
"What will you say?" he asked. "To Grant."
She was quiet, watching a town slide past—church steeple, diner sign, a lot full of cars wearing white caps. "I'll say I met a clerical error and it told me the truth. No. I'll say I can't marry someone I admire like a well-run department. I'll say kindness isn't the same as fit, and fit isn't the same as settling, and I refuse to confuse them just because Christmas makes everyone hungry for neat endings." She glanced at him. "And I won't mention you by name. Not because you're a secret. Because he deserves a conversation about us—Grant and me—not about a man on a train. You're not my excuse. You're my evidence that excuses were never the point."
Samuel nodded, throat tight. "That's fairer than most people manage."
"I'm a buyer. I know when something's priced wrong. Grant and I have been priced wrong for months. I kept paying anyway."