Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
The sentence had been: There is a kind of attention that looks like indifference from the outside, and I think you mistake your own stillness for not caring, when actually—
He'd been writing it when his pen ran out. He'd tried to hold it in his head, but like when things went from his head to his mouth, they got lost in translation. The only way he could keep the words in order was on paper.
But he was out of ink. The shortest distance between himself and a new pen would be the bookshop.
Freddie had debated for five minutes on whether or not to go into the shop. By then, the sentence was already unraveling in his head. In another two minutes, it might be gone altogether. And so he went.
And now he was back, but he'd lost the rest of the sentence somewhere between the shop door and the pavement.
This was the problem with composing in his head.
The sentences arrived fully formed in the interior, and then the exterior intervened — the cold air, the angle of the October light, a woman with a terrier who stopped directly in his path and then apologized for three times longer than the obstruction required — and by the time he was back at the cart the sentence had developed a hole in the middle where the good part had been.
He patted down his apron. No notebook. It was under the counter. But he couldn't wait until he got home. He might lose the beginning by then.
He pulled the receipt from his pocket instead.
It was from the hardware store, three weeks old, the back side blank.
He smoothed it against the wall outside the bookshop and wrote what he remembered of the sentence in the compressed, slightly urgent hand he used when he was working fast, the letters smaller and more slanted than usual.
He got to your own stillness and had to reconstruct the ending from memory, which never went as well as the original but sometimes went somewhere more interesting.
"So, Oliver Hartley." That was Bea's voice.
"Oliver Hartley," Wren's voice confirmed.
"He's our number one suspect in the Secret Admirer mystery."
Freddie folded the receipt and put it in his jacket pocket, next to the tenth letter, which had been there since Sunday and was not, he had decided, going to be delivered this week. Possibly not at all. Not if Wren thought Oliver was sending her the letters.
The cart needed wiping down, and he wiped it down. The afternoon moved at its own considered pace. He served four customers in forty minutes and said the appropriate things to all of them. Meanwhile, the tenth letter and the receipt with the transcribed sentence sat in his pocket.
He'd been in Pages the small, involuntary stillness of it, barely a second, before she looked back down at the paper with an expression he had no neutral word for.
The next customer said something. Freddie answered. He made the coffee. He did all of this with the automated competence of a person whose hands knew their job well enough to continue without instruction.
She thought it was Oliver.
He ran the logic in the time it took to tamp a shot.
Oliver came in weekly. Oliver read everything she recommended.
Oliver was — Freddie was capable of objectivity here; it was not a personal failing to be objective — Oliver was the kind of man a woman looked at when she was looking for someone.
Uncomplicated and decent and present in all visible ways.
If you handed someone nine letters and asked which of the men in your life might have written these, Oliver Hartley's name would arrive early.
Freddie's hand settled against his jacket pocket. The tenth letter sat there with the stillness of something that had been waiting three days already and had no objection to waiting longer.
Right, he thought. Right.