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“What's your favorite?' I must have looked confused. That's my trick; no one ever asks me which chocolate I prefer. 'Let me guess,' said the man in black, and, looking over the display, seemed to consider the chocolates, the candied fruits, the nougatines. Lingered for a moment over the green tea truffles; the salted pralines. Then he looked up, and his sea-blue eyes were filled with crazed reflections. 'You didn't like chocolate at first,' he said. 'You never used to eat it. But now, you're starting to understand. Its power to awaken the past; its dark and troubled history. The stories it tells about itself. It's many re-inventions. Ah. Here we are.' He paused at a tray of chocolate-dipped cherries, still with the stalks attached, and said. 'These, I think, Vianne Rocher. Dark chocolate, not always your favorite, but here, with cherries, it evokes something almost magical. Bite through the bitter chocolate shell to the brandied fruit inside. Hold the little stone on the tongue. Roll it gently around your mouth, like a long-kept secret.' He smiled, and I found myself liking him in spite of the coldness in my heart: the Man in Black has a kind of charm that I would never have suspected. I said: 'You may be right, monsieur. Yours is---' A gilded thread in the air. A little bastide on the Garonne. Not Vianne, but somewhere close; light, like the bloom on an apricot, a sky like the edge of forever---- I said, in a slightly trembling voice: 'Apricot hearts. They're your favorite.” — Joanne Harris