One Stall, Two Rivals

The market ran until the sixth of January, and on the last night the question that neither of them had said all season finally had nowhere left to hide. They had become, without quite agreeing to it, a single stall. Customers no longer knew whose was whose; they bought a bag of almonds and a honey-cake and a cup of glühwein from whichever pair of cold hands was free, and called the booth "the good one on fourteen." The chalk line had survived the first week and then simply stopped being redrawn, until one morning Liesel realised the counter was just a counter, and they had been working shoulder to shoulder along the whole length of it for days. She had been happier than she could remember being, and it frightened her more than the flood had. On the last night they sold the final cake at half past eleven, to a man buying it for a wife who had loved them for years. Then the square emptied, and the lamps went out one by one down the row, and it was just the two of them under the patched canvas with the snow coming down and the urn ticking as it cooled. "They'll rebuild fourteen in the spring," Anton said. "Two stalls again. Yours and mine, across the lane." He turned the empty ladle in his hands. "Back to twenty cents and ten minutes and pretending." "Yes," Liesel said. "I don't want to." He said it the way you set something down that you've carried too long, and Liesel