Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Wren arrived at her brother's house at six with a bottle of the red Maggie liked and a board book she'd set aside at the shop for Eli.
Her nephew was at the stage where he destroyed books with earnest enthusiasm and no malice whatsoever.
Wren considered it a professional obligation to keep him in fresh material.
"Uncle's here," Dylan said, appearing at the door, because this was the joke now and had been since the day Wren had introduced herself to her nephew.
"Unkawren," Eli exclaimed, holding his hands out for his aunt.
Wren wrapped the sweet boy in a hug and kisses, which immediately made him squirm to be let go.
The kitchen table was already set, candles lit, Maggie visible through the doorway in a blue apron that had flour on it, despite the fact that the dish was very clearly a roast and required no flour whatsoever. Wren kissed her cheek and was handed a glass of something sparkling and non-alcoholic.
"We're celebrating," Maggie said, her eyes bright, and looked at Dylan.
Dylan, who had always been constitutionally bad at keeping secrets—this was a matter of family record—had already begun to grin.
"Eli is going to have a sibling."
Wren made a sound that was not entirely a word.
She put her glass down on the counter without looking at where she was putting it and wrapped both arms around Maggie, who laughed and hugged her back, and then Dylan's arms came around both of them from behind, which was exactly the kind of thing Dylan did without embarrassment now, because he had learned the physical language of family from his wife and the people he cared for on the ranch.
Dinner was loud, unlike the quiet dignity of their family home.
Eli held court with his babbling, and every adult was fascinated by anything he said.
The toddler sat in his high chair and ate approximately forty percent of his food and redistributed the rest across a radius of two feet on the floor, where an assembly of dogs bowed down to each and every one of his offerings.
"He's going to be a handful when the new one comes," Dylan said.
"He already is," Maggie said. "We love him."
"We love him," Dylan agreed.
Eli, who appeared to understand this even without the words, put his hand flat on the tray in front of him and looked at his father with a huge grin.
Wren watched them. She cut her food and drank her wine and laughed at the right moments and was completely present, and underneath it all, like a low note held below the melody, there was something that pressed gently and persistently against the underside of her sternum.
Her parents had not met Eli. They had not seen Dylan's house, which he and Maggie had painted themselves the summer after the wedding.
It was a warm cream throughout, the front door a deep slate blue.
They did not know that Dylan had learned to cook, properly cook, things with stock and resting times, because Maggie had grown up in a house that was food insecure and regularly burned hotdogs.
Eli's grandparents had not held this baby.
Nor were they likely to hold the next one.
They probably wouldn't hold Wren's child if it wasn't Preston's offspring.
Wren knew this and kept it at arm's length, where it was manageable, and refilled her glass and asked Maggie whether they'd find out the gender this time.
"We're waiting," Maggie said. "We wanted to with Eli and we didn't manage to hold out."
Maggie covered his hand with hers with the expression of a woman who had long since fallen head over heels. Dylan turned his hand over and held hers, easy and certain, the way people did when holding hands had become as automatic as breathing.
Wren looked at the window, which reflected the candlelight back at them — the four of them and the small chaos of the table, the light warm and doubled.
She thought: I am so happy for them.
She thought: I want to call Mom.
She said neither of these things, and ate her food, and helped Maggie with the dishes while Dylan put Eli to bed, and left at nine with her coat buttoned and her scarf wound twice and a promise to come back in the middle of the week for lunch.
The cold was proper now, October doing what October had been threatening since the first of the month. Her breath came in visible puffs. The main street was quiet, and her boots were loud on the pavement.
Wren pulled out her phone and called her parents.
The phone rang five times. Six. The voicemail was her father's voice, recorded years ago: You've reached the Banks family, please leave a message.
She'd heard it so many times the words had lost their shape.
She hung up without leaving one. She never knew what to say.
She never knew if she was asking for something or offering something or simply wanting to be heard by the people who had known her longest and had chosen, for reasons she still turned over sometimes in the dark, not to know her anymore.
She kept walking. The cold pressed in at her collar. Her phone buzzed in her hand. She immediately thought it might be her parents, and so she pressed accept.
"Wren," Preston's voice, which she had once found reassuring. It had a respectable quality to it, confident and measured, the voice of a man who had always been certain he was the most prepared person in any room. "I'm so glad you picked up."
She stopped walking. "I didn't mean to."
"I've been trying to reach you." A pause. "I want to talk."
She stood on the empty street and looked at the closed front of the bakery and thought about the fact that she was cold and tired and had just sat at her brother's table and watched him hold his wife's hand.
"I made a mistake. You need to know that I understand that. I've done a lot of thinking, and you should take me back."
Wren pressed her fingers to her temple. She needed to understand. She should take him back. Already she felt the responsibility of Preston weighing down her shoulders.
"—reflection, and I understand now that I hurt you, and I understand that you're teaching me a lesson, and I want you to know that I have learned it. It won't happen again. It was—it was nerves. Pre-wedding—"
"Nerves," she said.
"It was a mistake," Preston said. "You know it didn't mean anything. You know she didn't—"
"She was my best friend. She was my maid of honor. I bought her a dress." Wren breathed out, a visible breath in the cold.
"We'd like you to sit down with us so that we can explain—"
"I deserve better than what the two of you did," Wren said. "I knew this when I ended it. I know it more now, and it doesn't have anything to do with teaching you a lesson. I'm not a lesson. I'm a person."
"Wren—"
She hung up.
What she felt, mostly, was tired. And underneath the tired, something like grief.
The grief wasn't for Preston. It hadn't been for Preston in quite some time.
It was for the version of herself who had sat across from him at restaurant tables for years and quietly shrunk, made her opinions smaller, made her enthusiasms less obvious, learned to present a tidier and more manageable version of herself, and had thought this was what love looked like—agreement.
Compatibility. The performance of being easy to love.
She put her phone in her pocket and walked the last hundred yards to Pages & Prose.
The shop was dark except for the amber nightlight she left on near the register, which was more for Heathcliff's benefit than for security.
She let herself in, locked the door behind her, and stood for a moment in the quiet.
It smelled the way it always smelled: old paper and new paper, the wood of the original shelves, the lingering ghost of the afternoon's tea.
The streetlight came through the front window in thin slats, catching the spines of the front display—she'd redone it on Monday, the fall poetry collection, all rust and gold and deep green.
In the dark, they were mostly shadow and silhouette.
Heathcliff materialized from somewhere behind the fiction section and wound once around her ankles, which was as close as he came to concern. She bent and ran her hand along his back, and he allowed it, briefly, before repositioning himself on the armchair with an air of having been generous.
She didn't turn on the lights. Instead, she went to grab the letterbox.
She carried the box to the back corner. The reading nook with the two armchairs that she'd found at an estate sale. She sat down on the floor between the shelves instead, her back against the poetry section, her knees drawn up. She opened the box and read the letters in order.
This was not how she usually read them. Usually she returned to one or two. She spot-read them, the way you revisit a playlist rather than an album. Tonight she read from the beginning.
The first letter was shorter than she'd remembered, more tentative—the handwriting controlled, the sentences careful, as though the writer had edited several drafts before this one. She made it all the way to the tenth letter before she started to cry.
Not the dramatic kind, not the kind Preston had once inspired in her that she'd had to take into the bathroom and run the tap for.
This was the kind of crying that happened when something had been held at arm's length for long enough that the arms got tired.
She pressed the heel of her hand to her eye and breathed through it and let it happen, because the shop was dark and the door was locked and Heathcliff was watching without judgment.
Someone was out there. Someone had been watching her for months. Close enough to see what she picked up first on the shelves, but he wanted to stay far enough away that she couldn't reach out to him.
What is wrong with her that he didn't want to get close to her? She was clever and warm and capable of great loyalty, and had been badly treated. He gave her his words but not his touch, and Wren very badly needed to be touched. She ached to be held. She would commit a crime for a hug.
She pressed both hands to her face. She breathed. She let it move through her.
Heathcliff got off the armchair. She didn't look up, but she heard him—the soft, deliberate weight of his landing, the unhurried crossing of the floorboards.
He settled beside her knee, not in her lap, not touching her, because he was not that kind of cat and she had never expected him to be—but there.
A warm, gray, substantial presence in the dark.
She put her hand on his back. He permitted it.
After a while, the worst of it passed, the way these things did. Not resolved, exactly, but exhausted into something manageable. She sat in the quiet of the shop with her letters on her knees and Heathcliff warm against her leg.
She wanted to find her secret admirer so much that it was almost unbearable. She also wanted, when she found him, to be ready to actually let him in. Not as a lovely mystery. As a person. And she wanted him to want the same.
I will find you, she thought. The thought had less detective energy than it had had a week ago. More longing.
She put the letters away carefully, one by one, in their tissue paper.
She closed the box. She sat for another minute on the floor with Heathcliff beside her and the poetry section behind her and the amber nightlight doing its quiet work, and then she put her palm flat on the floor, pushed herself up, and went to wash her face in the back room sink.
Her reflection looked back at her in the small mirror above the tap—glasses slightly crooked, eyes a little red, hair with a piece escaped from the clip at her nape.
A woman who had cried on the floor of her own shop.
A woman who had hung up on her ex-fiancé on a cold street.
A woman who was, despite considerable evidence of poor return on investment, still entirely capable of being made to feel things by twelve sentences in very careful handwriting.
She adjusted her glasses and looked at herself.
"Right," she said quietly to no one.
Then she turned off the tap and went to lock up the back.