The snow had started somewhere around Bridgeport and had not let up since, and by the time Wes Callahan's old green Plymouth Valiant slid to a stop against the curb on Juniper Lane, it had laid a clean white sheet over the whole of Merritt Falls, Connecticut, as if the town had been tucked in for the holiday and told not to fuss.
Delia Hart was out of the car before he had finished wrestling with the parking brake.
She did not wait for him. She did not wait for anything, he was beginning to understand. She came around the front of the Valiant with the pie dish held level against her ribs like something sacred, a red-checked dish towel tucked over the top, and she started up the front walk in long, sure strides, her tan knee-high boots punching neat holes in the fresh snow. Her long cream wool coat hung open over a burgundy ribbed sweater dress that hugged her from collarbone to knee, and a gold chain belt sat low on her hips and caught the light from the porch with every step, a small bright chiming of gold against all that white.
The house at the end of the walk was the same white colonial it had always been, black shutters, a brass knocker shaped like a pineapple, a wreath of balsam on the door that Wes's mother had certainly made herself at the kitchen table while listening to the radio. The porch light glowed amber through the falling snow. Every window on the ground floor was lit and frosted at the corners, so that the house looked like a lantern somebody had set down carefully in the middle of the night, and woodsmoke rose from the chimney and leaned east in the wind.
"Wait," Wes said, slamming his door and nearly losing his footing on the curb. "Delia. Wait up."
He hurried after her with a jug of cider in one hand and a paper sack of dinner rolls in the other. He was twenty-nine years old and he moved like a man who had spent most of those years carrying amplifiers down basement stairs, all elbows and apology. His dark-blond hair was shaggy and overdue for a cut and kept falling into his eyes, and he had not shaved in three days because shaving had seemed like the kind of thing a man did when he had his life in order, and he did not. He wore his worn brown leather jacket, the one with the torn lining and the cracked left elbow, over a mustard knit sweater his mother had sent him two Christmases ago, and brown corduroys that had gone soft and pale at the knees.
Delia stopped at the foot of the porch steps so suddenly that he almost walked into her back.
She turned. The porch light fell across her face, and for a moment Wes forgot the cider, the rolls, the snow, his mother, and the entire catastrophe of his life.
Her hair was honey-blonde and cut in long feathered layers that swept back from her face in soft, deliberate wings and fell past her shoulders with a volume that seemed to defy both the weather and physics. Snowflakes caught in it and stayed there, glittering. Her brows were arched clean and high, which made her look perpetually on the verge of asking a question she already knew the answer to. Brown smoky liner smudged along her lash lines and made her hazel eyes look darker and deeper than they had any right to be at six o'clock on a Thursday. There was peachy blush high on her cheekbones, warmed further by the cold, and her lips were glossy and pink-nude and very slightly curved, as though something about all of this amused her a great deal.