Wes looked down at the pink paper in his hand.
"Why didn't you just say something?" he said. "In April. Any Saturday. Why didn't you just say, hey, I gave you a franc once?"
"Because I wanted you to remember me without being told," said Delia. Her voice broke, finally, a small clean break, like a twig. "That's all. It's stupid. I wanted you to look up one Saturday and see me. And you never did, and then yesterday you stood there and told me you'd invented a girl, a whole girl, with a cat and a sister and a bad back, rather than—" She stopped. She pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. "And I thought, all right. All right. If he can only see me as a girl he made up, I'll be that. For one night. I'll be that, and at least I'll get to sit next to him."
The boy in the red snowsuit had stopped tunneling and was watching them with frank interest. So was the beagle.
"And now your mother has given me a ring," said Delia, and her eyes spilled over at last, two shining tracks through the brown smoke of her liner, "that belongs to somebody who isn't pretending, and I'm standing in the snow holding it, and you're looking at me like I tricked you. And maybe I did. Maybe that's exactly what I did."
"Delia—"
"No." She held up a hand. "I'm going to go. I'm going to go home."
"The roads are closed. The parkway—"
"The trains are running out of Stamford. I heard it on the radio this morning." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, smearing peach and brown together. "Your mother's neighbor is driving to his daughter's in Stamford at eleven. He told us so at seven o'clock this morning while you were asleep. He'll take me."