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.