Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
Wren
There are three firemen lined up in my bakery and the entire town of Ember Hollow waiting to see what I do about it, and my whole body’s forgotten how to work.
Cal’s still red to the ears from the worst, best speech I’ve ever heard.
Rhett’s at his left shoulder, no smirk anywhere on him.
Eli’s at his right, steady as bedrock, quiet eyes holding mine, the same ones that have apparently been on me since my first September morning in this town.
Three men. Three confessions. One counter between me and all of it, floury and familiar, the last thing I’ve got left to hide behind.
Six weeks ago I came to this town to run a dead woman’s bakery and keep my head down, and somewhere under the grief the quiet suited me.
Marigold left me a shop at the end of a long road in a place nobody would come looking, and I took it like a hiding spot, a plan to be nobody’s anything.
And nobody’s anything is standing in the middle of the room right now with three alphas and half a town aimed at her, so that plan can go ahead and file for a refund.
I reach for the argument. The old reliable one.
The one that’s explained my whole life to me in a calm, reasonable voice, you don’t get this, Wren, it isn’t for you, they’re being kind, it’s a fever, it’s a phase, it’s a mistake they’ll walk back by Sunday.
I reach for it out of twenty-eight years of habit.
It’s not there. It hasn’t been there since four yesterday morning, since Eli stood on my step with empty hands. I keep reaching into the dark for the light switch and finding bare wall.
Upstairs, in my inbox, there’s a door propped open.
A job with my name on it. An apartment that never once asked me for a thing.
A whole small quiet life, folded and waiting.
A life where nobody stands in my shop in front of God and the Pelham twins to swear he wants to be wearing my flour at eighty.
I’ve kept that door cracked for a week now.
Past the week — Diane’s deadline ran out yesterday, and at six this morning she sent one line, no exclamation point, no hon.
Tonight, or I call the next name. My hand’s been on the frame all day.
And standing here with three men and a town holding their breath, I finally see the door for what it is. Not safety. It was never safety. It’s the same wall I’ve always built, put up in a different city. A place where nothing good can reach me because I made sure to fill it with nothing at all.
That’s the whole genius of the exit, looked at straight on.
It was never a way out to somewhere better.
It was a way to never once have to find out whether I could be chosen, dressed up nicely as good sense.
As long as the door stayed cracked, I got to stay a woman who could have said yes, instead of a woman who did and got proven right or wrong.
Cowards call that keeping your options open.
I’ve been calling it that my whole life.
I could go back to it. I could be the woman who almost had this and was smart enough not to risk it. I know exactly how to be her. I’ve been her my whole life.
I’m so tired of being her.
Somewhere in the last six weeks, this town quit being the place I was hiding and turned into the place I live.
It fed me when my shop caught fire. It fixed my oven.
It put me in charge of its festival like it never once crossed anybody’s mind I might not stay.
And these three impossible men keep looking at me like I’m the actual point, not the nice-enough time I always figured I was.
I don’t get to keep calling that a mistake. Not with a straight face. Not anymore.
“There’s something I haven’t told any of you,” I hear myself say. My voice comes out shaky and too loud in the silent shop, but it comes out. “For a week now. Longer.”
Cal’s face goes scared. Rhett goes still. I make myself keep going, because I’ve swallowed this sentence three times and it’s gone rancid on me, and it’s time.
“There’s a job. Back in the city. My old boss, my old apartment, the whole safe little life I ran away from.
It’s been sitting in my inbox since the morning after my heat, and I’ve been keeping it there like a fire exit.
Every day one of you was sweet to me, I looked at that exit and thought, good, I’ve got somewhere to run when this goes wrong.
” My eyes are stinging. I let them. “That’s the thing I couldn’t say.
That I’ve had one foot out the door this whole time.
That I was going to leave you before you could leave me, because leaving first is the only trick I’ve ever had for surviving being wanted. ”
Nobody in the shop breathes. Mrs. Alder has abandoned all pretense of festival prep.
“So I’m saying it out loud.” I put both hands flat on the counter, the last wall, and I push off it.
I come around the end of it, out into the middle of my own shop, out from behind the one thing I’ve hidden behind since the day I got here.
“I’m not taking the job. I’m deleting the damn email.
I don’t want the safe little life. I’ve had the safe little life, and safe is just a kinder word for empty. ”
I walk up to the three of them. Up close, Cal’s still trembling. Eli’s holding himself dead still by main force. Rhett’s looking at me like I’m the last card in a game he was sure he’d already lost.
“I’m scared out of my mind,” I tell them, all three, my voice wobbling everywhere.
“I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be wanted by one person, never mind three.
I’m going to be bad at it. I’m going to keep grabbing for that wall out of habit, and you’ll have to be patient with me while I learn there’s no bill coming at the end.
” I drag in a breath. “But yes. Okay? Yes. To trying. To all three of you. To being somebody’s, out loud, in a town that apparently already had a betting pool running. ”
For one more second, the shop stays dead silent.
Then Cal makes a sound like the air’s gone out of him.
He closes the distance and picks me clean up off the floor.
I’m laughing and crying into his neck, and over his shoulder I watch the whole shop come apart at once.
Della’s got both hands pressed to her face.
The Pelham twins have started, God help us, applauding.
Mrs. Alder is telling anyone who’ll listen it’s about time.
Dot Hale wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand and says it to the room, to the ceiling, to six years of empty bunks she watched these boys pretend not to feel. “Told you. I told every last one of you.” And for once, nobody argues with the chief.
Cal sets me down and Eli’s right there. He doesn’t say anything, because it’s Eli.
He just takes my face in his two big hands, rests his forehead against mine, and breathes, like a man who finally got asked to sit down.
And then Rhett’s spinning me around, kissing me senseless in front of the entire town, because it’s Rhett.
When he pulls back, he’s grinning, but his eyes are wet, and he says, “Knew you had it in you, trouble.”
I stand in the middle of my bakery, in the middle of my three, in the middle of a town that’s been quietly holding a spot for me since the day I rolled in trying to be nobody, and I let it be true. All of it. No catch. No bill. Nobody keeping score.
I’m still scared. I’ll be scared for a while yet. The wall took twenty-eight years to build, and it isn’t coming down in one afternoon, and there’ll be mornings I reach for a brick out of pure habit.
Later, when the shop’s finally emptied out and it’s just the four of us and a wreck of bunting, I take out my phone.
I find the email. Diane’s cheerful subject line, THINKING OF YOU, the tidy little life waiting behind one reply.
Three men go quiet around me, and I can feel how badly they want to tell me it’s okay, that I don’t have to prove anything to anyone.
I feel them decide not to say it, because it’s mine to do.
So I do it. I delete it. It takes half a second and no ceremony at all, three hours inside Diane’s last deadline, not that anyone’s counting anymore.
Then the exit’s just gone, and the only door left open is the one I’m already standing in.
I think about Marigold, somewhere in all of it. Her shop, her counter, her festival, the whole warm noisy life she built here and left to me like she knew. Like she knew I’d need somewhere that wouldn’t let me disappear. I hope she can see this. I hope she’s cackling.
I made this choice with my own two hands, the same hands that built a nest before I’d let myself say what I wanted. This time, my head and my hands finally agree.
I’m staying.
God help all four of us, I’m staying.