Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Freddie was going to tell her tonight.
This was decided. He had told Dylan, and the words had come. Tonight at dinner they would come again, and this time they would be addressed correctly.
He had been rehearsing the shape of it—not a script.
He'd learned from the notebook that scripts were the wrong approach.
What was needed was not a prepared monologue, but a willingness to begin and trust that the rest would follow.
The beginning was the hard part. Once he began, he thought he could continue.
He was moving past the back of the craft stalls when Oliver fell into step beside him.
"The letters," Oliver said.
Freddie kept walking.
"It's you, isn't it." It was not a question. It was said in the tone of a man stating something he had already concluded and was simply opening the floor for confirmation.
Around them the town moved —voices, footsteps, the smell of mulled cider and woodsmoke. A child ran past them with a Gameboy chirping electronic music.
"Yes," Freddie said.
Oliver nodded. He did not look surprised. He looked, if anything, like a man whose accounts had balanced. "How long?"
"Since September."
"She thought it was me. She wrote me a letter."
Oliver reached into his jacket pocket and produced an envelope, sealed and then opened. Oliver's name was on the front in Wren's handwriting. Freddie had seen her looping, forward-leaning script of someone whose thoughts moved fast.
"It was on a pile of mail at my office. I've just told her it wasn't me."
Oliver held it out.
Freddie looked at the envelope. He looked at Oliver.
"Read it," Oliver said. "You should read it."
Freddie took it.
The card inside was one page, front and back, in the same looping script. He read it standing in the middle of the street. The reading took less than two minutes and felt much longer.
Wren had written about the letters. About what they had meant.
Not the mystery of who wrote them, but the content, the specific quality of attention in them, the feeling of being seen in the small things.
Freddie's gaze snagged on one part in particular: I think I might be in love with him. If it's you, you know where to find me.
The words were perfect. They were exactly what he had hoped, in the abstract that she might feel—exactly what he had hoped in the careful, distanced way of a man who had been hoping things from behind glass for months and not allowed himself to fully believe in.
But they were written to Oliver.
Freddie folded the letter. He put it back in the envelope. He held it for a moment, looking at his own hands; the hands that had written letters in black ink on cream paper and slipped them through a brass slot in the dark.
"I should have told her," he said.
"Yes," Oliver said. Without judgment, without elaboration.
"I'm going to. Tonight."
"She doesn't know it's you. She's just found out it isn't me." Oliver held Freddie's gaze with the directness of a man who was not going to soften this. "Do it now. Go and talk to her."
Freddie walked to Pages the pen. Her pen.
He sat on the bookshop steps for a moment. He put the pen to the page and wrote.
No Dear Wren. No opening. Just:
It's Freddie. I have been writing to you since the sixteenth of September. The letters are all true. Every word is true. I put them through your slot before seven in the morning because I am a coward, and I have been a coward for ten letters. I am not going to be a coward about this one.
He paused. Read it back. Continued.
The problem is that I have always been able to say what I mean on paper and not in person. Here I am again choosing paper because it’s safer, and I am sorry for that.
I would like to say it in person. I intend to say it in person. Tonight at dinner, I will tell you to your face. This is the last letter I'll write to you. Tonight, you'll hear my words.
— Freddie
No book references. No literary framework. No careful selection of the right precedent from the right author to give the feeling the shape of something already understood. Just his name, and what he meant.
He folded the letter. He got up from the step. The last of the day's light had gone, and the main street was lit by the fairy lights and the lamp-posts and the warm windows of the pub at the end, and Pages & Prose was dark.
He shoved the letter into the brass slot. He stood for a moment on the threshold. On the outside of the glass, where he had always been, where he had positioned himself deliberately for months and months. He thought about all the things she might add up.
He was walking into a situation where she might not forgive him. Where she might accuse him of lying by omission. He knew this.
He knew what he felt. That was, he realized, a new thing. Or not new, but clarified: he knew it completely, without the cushion of maybe or the managed distance of the letters.
Freddie Gallagher was in love with Wren Banks. Had been for longer than he'd admitted it to himself. Would be—he understood this, on the step of her darkened shop on an early evening in October, with ten letters behind him and the night ahead—for considerably longer than he currently had data for.
He turned and walked back down the main street. Tonight he would say it—all of it, in his own voice, without paper—and whatever happened after that would happen.
He had been afraid of this for months.
He was still afraid of it.
He was going to do it, anyway.