Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The restaurant was called Ember, and it had twelve tables and a menu that changed with the season. Candles on each table. Dark wood. The smell of something braised and something with rosemary and the low murmur of other people's evenings.
Freddie had arrived twenty minutes early.
He was always early. It was a temperamental condition rather than a virtue.
He had chosen a table near the window, which looked out onto the side street adjacent to the market, which meant he could see the fairy lights from the main street reflected back at him.
He had ordered a root beer and declined the menu when it was offered, and sat with his hands flat on the table and attempted to think about nothing in particular.
He was not succeeding.
He looked out of the window. The stars were twinkling back at him from up high. He wondered if that was a good sign. The last of the sun was receding, and the moon was almost tucked into its throne in the sky.
He thought: I should go to the shop.
He thought: she's coming here. She'll be here in ten minutes. Stay.
He thought: if she's read the letter—
The door opened. He looked up.
Wren came through it with her coat flying open and her hair down and around her round face, and her cheeks flushed from the cold or from moving fast. She looked across the restaurant and found him.
She smiled, brighter than the sun, bigger than the moon.
She crossed the room before he had fully stood up.
She walked into his arms.
He caught her; his hands found her waist, then her back, the automatic reflex of a man who had been steadying her for months.
She was warm, which was surprising as she'd just come in from the cold air.
She was holding the front of his jacket with both hands.
Her face was pressed against his shoulder, and for three full seconds Freddie did not move because he was too busy understanding that she was here, and she had come to him, and his arms were around her.
She had read it. She must have read it. She had found the letter and read it, and come here, and this was—
She pulled back far enough to look at his face. Her eyes were bright. Her expression had the specific quality of a woman who had arrived somewhere she'd been traveling toward and knew it.
"I think I'm in love with you," she said.
The words arrived without ceremony, in her direct voice, the one she used when ordering takeout over the phone. The restaurant continued around them, low and warm, other diners oblivious. The rosemary smell and the candlelight and the moon, and the stars twinkling down at them.
Freddie looked at her.
He had thought about this moment—had thought about various versions of it from various angles for a significant portion of the last eight weeks—and had not, he now discovered, adequately prepared for the experience of Wren Banks looking directly at him in a candlelit restaurant and saying those words with her coat still open and both hands on his jacket.
"I've been in love with you since the first time I saw you," he confessed.
Her brow moved; a slight shift as she registered his words.
"At the ranch," he said. "When you came for your nephew's birthday.
You arrived in that coat—" He stopped. Started again.
The sentences that had been rehearsed had all dissolved.
"I didn't know how to say any of it. I didn't know how to say it then and I still didn't know when you opened the bookshop, and then I heard you read aloud and I went home and I wrote you a letter because that's what I—because paper was—"
He saw the moment it happened. It was not a dramatic shift.
It was a small one, the kind that was visible only because he had spent months watching her face with the attention of a man who had been studying it from twelve feet away.
A fractional stillness. Her hands, still on his jacket, went very slightly still.
"Letters?" Her eyes changed. "You wrote the letters," she said.
Not a question. The sentence of a person who had just received a piece of information that was rearranging the furniture of everything else they knew.
"Yes," he said.
"You…" She stepped back. Not far—his hands were still at her waist, just—there was distance now that hadn't been there. "All of them."
"All of them."
"The one I signed—I left it tonight. Before I came here. Did you…" He looked at her face. "Did you get it?"
Something was happening in her expression that Freddie couldn't fully read. It was moving through several things in quick succession; the bright certainty she'd walked in with, something underneath it that was surprise, something under that which he recognized and which was not warm.
She stepped back further.
His hands dropped.
"You left the letter tonight," she said slowly. "At the shop. You signed it."
"Yes."
"With your name."
"Yes."
"Freddie."
"Wren—"
"After." She stopped. Her voice had gone very quiet.
Not cold, not furious, something more fundamental than either.
The voice of a woman whose accounting had just encountered a figure that didn't match.
"After the committee meetings. After the rain.
After…" She looked at him. "After you came inside the bookshop. "
Freddie held her gaze. He did not look away. He was not, he had decided some time ago, going to hide from this part.
"Yes," he said.
The restaurant moved around them. Someone laughed at the table near the bar.
A waiter crossed the room with two plates of something that smelled like the braised thing and the rosemary thing, and the ordinary evening continued its ordinary work while Wren looked at him with an expression he had not seen before and which he understood he had produced.
She had come here to choose him. He could see it in her face, could see the trace of it still, the warmth she'd walked in with.
She had crossed the room and walked into his arms and said I think I'm in love with you and she had meant it.
Every word of it. And she had meant it for a man she thought she knew.
"You kissed me," she said. The inventory quality of the voice was not accusatory, just precise, the way she was precise about things that mattered. "You held me in my own shop. And all this time you had…you were…"
"Yes," he said for the third time, because it was the only word available that was true.
"All of it was me. The man in the shop and the man who wrote the letters are the same man.
I should have told you earlier. I should have told you from the beginning.
" He paused. "I was afraid of what you'd do with it. "
She looked at him.
He looked back.
The candlelight between them flickered in a draft from the kitchen. It was a small movement. It settled again into stillness.
Wren took another step back. Not angry. Not—he searched her face and found something he understood: the expression of a woman who needed to think without an audience, who was going to process this somewhere private, who was not going to do the reckoning here, in a restaurant, with rosemary in the air and his hands empty where they'd been full thirty seconds ago.
"I need…" Her hand was at her coat, the button she hadn't done up. She did it up now, carefully, buying herself a moment. "I need to go."
She looked at him for a long moment. Freddie let her look. He had nothing to hide behind tonight. The letter was signed. He was here, name attached, no paper between them, and whatever she found when she looked, she was welcome to it.
Wren turned. She walked back through the restaurant, past the other diners who had no idea what had just happened in the candlelight, and pushed through the door into the cold.
Freddie stood at the table.
The waiter appeared at his elbow. "Ready to order?"
"No," Freddie said. "Thank you."
He sat back down. He looked at the stars and the moon through the window.
He looked at his own hands on the table; the hands that had written ten love letters.
The hands that had let the love of his life slip through his fingers and walk out the door.
He wanted to chase after her. But there was nothing more he could say.
Nothing more he could do. All that was left to do was to wait for the reckoning.