Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She walked.
Not away from him specifically. Wren didn't walk with the energy of flight.
She didn't retreat in the dramatic exit of a woman making a statement.
She just went forward, through the restaurant door and into the cold, because the alternative was standing there while her face did things she had not decided to do with it, and she was not going to do that.
The October air hit her, and she pulled her coat closed and walked.
Her mind was doing the thing it did when information arrived too large and too fast: it sorted.
She had always been like this. It was how she'd managed the breakup with Preston, how she'd managed her parents, the methodical laying out of facts in their order, the internal arrangement of what was true before she decided what to feel about it.
Freddie wrote the letters.
She turned this over.
She had written a letter to Oliver and slid it under his door, confessing her feelings for a man she thought was Oliver, and Oliver had not written the letters.
Freddie had written the letters.
Freddie, who had been twelve feet away every morning. Freddie, who had made her flat white without being asked. Freddie, who had walked on the street side of the pavement and steadied her when she wobbled and held her in the amber lamplight of the shop.
Freddie, who had kissed her. After the committee meetings. In the rain. In the bookshop.
She had asked him, once, weeks ago, if he was all right. He had said yes in a way that meant no. She had known it meant no and done nothing with it, had filed it under inexplicable, had added it to the file she'd been keeping that had always had a label she'd declined to read.
It was him; it had always been him, and in a way she felt like she already knew.
She stopped at the corner where the residential street began and stood in the cold with her hands in her pockets and looked at the wet pavement and tried to find the edges of what she was feeling.
It was not rage. She had expected rage; had braced for it, vaguely, as she'd walked out of the restaurant. What was here was quieter than that and more complicated, and in some ways harder, because rage had a shape she could push against.
This was the feeling of a woman who had fallen twice and discovered she had really only fallen once.
She had read the letters in the lamplight and she had gone to the market committee and she had kissed him on the pavement and she had stood in the amber dark of the shop with both his arms around her, and she had thought she was managing two separate feelings; the admirer on one side, Freddie on the other, and the impossible task of choosing between them.
There had been nothing to choose. There had only ever been one man.
She pressed the heel of her hand to her sternum, where the doubled weight of it sat. First, for the letters. Then for him. Twice, the same person, without knowing it.
Freddie had loved her since the ranch. Before the shop, before the cart, before the letters.
He had set up the cart where he set it up because of her.
The position she had looked out at every morning, the twelve feet between them that she had thought was proximity and was, she now understood, the smallest distance he could manage between himself and the thing he couldn't say.
This did not make it right.
She turned and began walking again. Not back to the restaurant—not yet, not tonight. Wren walked toward the bookshop, toward the amber nightlight and the shoebox and Heathcliff's watchful quiet. She needed to be somewhere her hands knew what to do.
She did not perform anything on the walk. She did not arrange her face. She let it do what it did. She wore the mask of the complicated work of a woman processing too many true things at once.
She pushed open the door of Pages the inhabited kind, the sound of a space that knew her. The letters were spread across every surface, and she had read them all twice now. She sat with the accumulated weight of them, which was considerable.
She looked at the chalk menu board through the open door to the front of the shop.
She had looked at it hundreds of times. She had looked at it this morning and not seen it, and now she was looking at it and seeing it entirely.
It had been block letters, but there—the L of love had a bit of a loop.
A familiar loop that was in each of the letters.
Wait? Love? Wait, coffee drink had love in the title?
This morning the board didn't list prices or the day's special. This morning it said I'm in love with Wren Banks and it was signed Freddie Gallagher. It was front and center on the sidewalk for all to see.
The lettering was precise, slightly compact, with a controlled slant to the right. The capitals clean and deliberate. The lowercase letters with their particular even spacing, each one the same measured distance from the next.
She looked at the seventh letter on the table. She looked at the board. She looked at the letter. It was the same hand. She thought back to when the word latte had been on the board. She remembered it had the same loop, unlike the rest of the block letters.
It had always been the same hand; the chalk on the board and the ink on the cream paper, the same slight slant, the same measured spacing, the same quality of a person who wrote the way they did everything: carefully, with full attention, without wasted motion.
She had looked at the chalkboard every day for eight weeks.
She had looked at the letters every day for eight weeks. She had not—
She laughed. A small sound, involuntary, the laugh of a woman who had just discovered the dimension of her own blind spot and found it both mortifying and somehow clarifying.
She had been a detective for eight weeks with a significant clue right outside her own shop, visible from the reading chair she sat in every single morning, and looked right through it because she had been looking for what she expected to find.
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.
The letters. The board. The flat white ready before she'd ordered. The glass on the pavement.
She took her hands from her eyes and looked at letter eleven.
This is the last letter I'll write to you. Tonight, you'll hear my words.
He'd been planning to tell her. He'd worked up the courage to do it. She wondered why? Had Oliver told him that Wren suspected him? Had Dylan set him straight the other day in town?
She was reading it now as evidence of Freddie Gallagher at his kitchen table at some late hour, a notebook open, writing the truest thing he knew how to write in the way he knew how to write it. Putting it on paper because his voice wouldn't carry it to her.
She thought about him on the wet corner the other night. The words forming and dissolving. The effort visible, the most effort she had seen on his face, the controlled surface doing its inadequate work while something under it pushed at the walls.
He had been afraid.
Wren knew what afraid felt like. She had been afraid for months; afraid of being a disappointment to her admirer, afraid of herself being too much, afraid of wanting something too much to lose it. Fear was a reasonable response to the evidence of her own romantic history.
Freddie was frightened, and he had not stopped. He had written ten letters, and he had moved the cart to the street outside her window, and he had shown up every day, and had slipped a signed confession through her brass slot and sat in a restaurant waiting for her.
He had tried. Badly, in some ways. Not perfectly. But persistently, daily, with both arms.
She looked at the chalk menu board. At the handwriting that had always been his handwriting. Then at the man who waited patiently on his side of the street.
Freddie was waiting for permission. He wasn't the kind of man to barge in. He wasn't the kind of man to ignore her feelings and put his own first.
Wren unlocked the shop door and pushed it open.