Candy.

Once you realize that the classic hiding of chocolates – the box behind the flour, the pralines among the tea bags, the velvet pouch in the shallow cutlery drawer – fails time and again because hungry relatives don’t actually search but predict (and prediction is the stubborn cousin of habit), there appears the bold yet persuasive strategy of hiding in plain sight, where perception, clouded by accessibility and numbed by routine, forgoes suspicion precisely because the mind refuses to believe that anyone would so brazenly display their treasure and still keep it, thus creating the paradox that one’s possession is all the more secure the more brazenly it is displayed.

Consider then the nose, the extended balcony of the face, the small flagpole where scents land and direction is chosen; place a bonbon on its tip and you get a miniature theater of cognitive dissonance, for everyone sees the object and yet no one sees it as prey, partly because the same etiquette that prevents us from wiping crumbs from another's lip also forbids us from redrawing the architecture of someone's nose with a corrective tap, so that the clan, hungry but civilized, laughs, points, and comments, but keeps its hands in check, while you, the temporary temple guardian of cocoa, defy gravity with finely measured head movements, guard the balance, and casually ventilate your prey with a breeze of scent.

But the forehead, that solemn space between the eyebrows where sentences are frowned and plans are born, also has its rhetoric; slide a praline precisely there and it elevates itself to a talisman, a chocolate third eye that, because it resembles meaning and not nourishment, is read by onlookers more as a joke, a performance, or a ceremonial badge than an edible possession, so that people talk around it, take selfies with it, project interpretations onto it – and meanwhile, oh, the irony, forget its edible function – although it is precisely this elevation to symbol that also pricks curious fingers, for symbols are poked at, tested, doubted, and the more seriousness the forehead exudes, the greater the desire to disrupt that seriousness.

Yet physics dictates that we remain cool-headed: skin temperature is higher on the forehead than on the nose, deeper within the motoric processes of thought and sweat, causing the fragile edge of a finely poured ganache to yield more quickly, the bonbon to sag, slide, melt, and—more treacherously—leave a trail of chocolate that not only betrays but also triggers a desire to clean, which in turn activates hands (and hands, as every secret knows, are its natural enemies); the nose, on the other hand, cooler and more pointed, offers a smaller contact surface, less melting surface, more grip through micro-corrections, and thus functions as a seesaw on which mass and grace balance each other.

Psychologically, the nose also acts as a buffer, because a bonbon immediately triggers the clown in us – laughter dampens the grasping reflex – while the same object between the eyebrows awakens the professor in us, and professors are rebelled against, which translates into fingers that, under the guise of irony, are more likely to dare to touch someone's face; add to that the social-tactile taboo of touching someone's face without permission, and you understand how the nose, precisely because of its vulnerability, draws a polite fence around your possessions, while the forehead, precisely because of its unapproachable authority, can become an invitation to scaffold.

Then there's the tactic of shameless excess: by carrying the bonbon so openly that it almost becomes a flag, the urge to hunt is quickly extinguished, because what is constantly visible becomes decor, and you don't eat decor—you walk around it; this habituation advantage proves greater on the nose than on the forehead, because the nose is constantly producing micro-movements that make the prop alive yet elusive, while the forehead, more stately and flat, screams meaning and thus draws attention, and attention is the sun in which chocolate melts and plans evaporate.

Taking everything into account – temperature, texture, gravity, etiquette, humor, symbolism, and the subtle play of attention – I make the sound choice for the tip of the nose as the safest hiding place in plain sight: mobile, cooler, socially untouchable, and, thanks to its cheerful nonsense, precisely that Gordian knot in which seeing and preserving coincide, after which, as soon as the family dissolves into a fit of laughter or turns away for a moment, with one graceful nod you let the bonbon land like a descending star in your mouth, and the secret, which never seemed secret, is triumphantly consumed without anyone else realizing that the treasure had long since been found.