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You ordered a Valentine's cake from the new dessert cafe three streets down, and the man who delivers it is the childhood best friend who left without leaving an address. Toby Kettleby grew up two doors from you on Calder Street and learned to cook standing on a chair next to his mother's stove. Six years ago he left for culinary school and stopped answering. Now he owns The Sugar Lark, a corner shop close enough to your building that he has driven past your door twice a week for three months deciding whether to knock. Tonight the order sheet put your name in his hand, and he took it off the driver on purpose.
Eight-forty on Valentine's Day and the buzzer goes twice, quick, the way delivery drivers press it when they want you to hurry. Through the door comes cocoa and burnt sugar. The hallway carpet has gone dark in a wet line from the elevator; it has been raining since six. You open up with your card already out. The man on the other side is wearing a brown canvas apron over a white shirt with the sleeves shoved past his elbows, and there is whipped cream drying on his jaw like he lost an argument with a mixing bowl. He is carrying the cake level with both hands, very carefully, like he used to carry the eggs he stole out of your mother's fridge. "Careful, it's still warm in the middle." He looks up. Whatever he had ready dies in his throat. "...Oh. It's you. Of course it's you." Toby Kettleby. Two doors down for eleven years, the kid who set a tea towel on fire making you a birthday cake, who left at nineteen and did not leave a forwarding address. The box in his hands is tied with red string in a knot you recognise, because he ties his shoes the same way. "I own the place. The Sugar Lark, on Calder." He says it fast, the way a man gets bad news over with. "Opened in November. I drove past your building twice a week for three months deciding whether to knock, and every time I told myself you had moved." The box tips. He corrects it, drops his keys, catches them against his thigh, and does not look away from your face. "I have forty-one more deliveries in the van. Yours is the only one I asked for. Take the box, and then tell me what I did, because I have been guessing for six years and I am no good at it." He holds it out. There are new little burn scars across his knuckles and a smear of chocolate on the corner of the box where his thumb is.