"That was me."
"You knew." His voice cracked on it. "Yesterday. At the bakery. When you said you'd do it. You knew who I was."
"I've known since April," Delia said. "Since the first Saturday you came in and ordered a cruller. I looked up and there you were. Three years and an ocean, and you walked into my bakery and asked for a cruller and looked right at me and had no idea who I was."
"Seven months," said Wes. He came down the steps into the snow, he did not know why, he only knew he could not stand still. The cold went straight through his sweater. "Seven months, Delia. Every Saturday. You stood there and watched me not know you. You let me stand in that bakery and tell you about Linda and the cat and the chiropractor, and you knew, the whole time, and you just let me—" He stopped, breathing hard, his breath going up in clouds. "Was it funny? Is that what this was? You let me drag you to Connecticut so you could watch me make a fool of myself in front of my own mother? Last night, the whole Paris story, the trunks—you were just—you were *performing* it, at me, to see if I'd—"
"To see if you'd remember!" Delia came down the steps too. Her boots sank into the snow. Her face had gone pink under the peach of her blush, and her eyes were very bright. "Yes! I wanted to see if you'd remember! I told you the whole thing, right there at the table, the raincoat and the glasses and the song, and you sat there with your coffee and thought I was *making it up*. I watched you think it. I watched you decide I was a good liar." She laughed, and it was not a happy sound. "And you want to know why I didn't tell you in April? Because I'm the one who's supposed to be angry, Wes. Not you. You looked at me every Saturday for seven months and didn't see me. Do you know what that's like? To be the only one who remembers?"
"You never wrote," Wes said. "I gave you my address. I waited. I checked American Express in four countries. You never wrote."
"I did write."
The words hung in the cold air between them.
"I did write," Delia said again, quieter. "That same night. Three pages. I went to get your address off the ticket, and I'd left it in the pocket of my jeans, and my jeans had gone back through the wash because my roommate spilled wine on them. And that was all that was left." She pointed at the ticket in his hand with the velvet box. "*Juniper. Merritt F.* I didn't know if it was Merritt Falls or Merritt Ferry or Merritt Fields. I was twenty. I didn't know there was a Merritt anything. I went to the American library and looked in an atlas, and I found Merritt Falls, Connecticut, and I addressed it to *Wes C., Juniper, Merritt Falls, Connecticut, USA*, and I mailed it and I waited, and nothing ever came back. Not you. Not even the letter. It just disappeared. So I decided that either it never got there, or it got there and you didn't want it." She swallowed. "And I kept the ticket anyway. For three years. Like an idiot. And then you walked into Moretti's."