Chapter 3 Hollow Creek
Eight months in, Wren had learned a new geography.
Hollow Creek sat forty minutes from Iron Falls, close enough that she still occasionally passed someone in the grocery store who knew her married name, far enough that most days she could walk to work without a stranger's pity trailing her down the cereal aisle.
She had used the last of her savings and a small inheritance from her grandmother to buy the shop from Dot, who cried when she handed over the keys and told Wren the place needed someone who still believed books could fix things.
Wren wasn't sure she believed that anymore. She liked the quiet regardless.
"You're doing the face again," Reyna said, not looking up from a box of returns."What face.""The one where you're someplace else. Third time since we opened, and it's not even ten."
Reyna had worked the register longer than Wren had owned the shop, a fierce, funny woman in her fifties who'd taken one look at Wren the week she arrived, hollow-eyed and flinching at every low engine rumble from the street, and decided without being asked that she'd be keeping an eye on her.
"I'm fine."
"You're fine like a house is fine right before it isn't." Reyna set the box down and looked up properly. "It's the anniversary coming, isn't it. Of the whole thing."
Wren didn't answer, which was answer enough.
Eight months, and she still couldn't say the word divorce out loud without her chest going tight, mostly because there hadn't been one yet.
The papers sat half-finished in a drawer upstairs, and some stubborn wounded part of her kept finding reasons not to complete them.
She told herself she was busy. She told herself a lot of things these days she didn't fully believe.
"He hasn't tried to contact you again?"
"Not since the letter." Cain had written her one in month three, long and clumsy, full of things he clearly didn't know how to say out loud, and she'd read it twice and put it in a shoebox in her closet without responding, because answering felt like opening a door she'd worked so hard to shut.
"Men like that don't know better. They just get quiet for a while and then they don't."
Wren almost smiled. Reyna had never met Cain Ryker, had only heard the broad strokes, but she had an uncanny read on the kind of man who wore a president's patch like it made him bulletproof.
Wren had believed that once too. She'd believed a lot of things about Cain that had turned out to be only partly true, which was somehow worse than being lied to outright.
A whole lie you could hate cleanly. A mostly-true man who'd broken your heart anyway left you arguing with yourself for months.
The bell rang. A customer needed help finding a birthday gift for his granddaughter, and Wren spent twenty minutes losing herself in the small, solvable problem of matching a twelve-year-old to the right book, easier by a wide margin than solving anything about her own life.
That night, after closing, she climbed the narrow stairs to her apartment and did what she did most nights now.
She sat at the kitchen table with tea going cold beside her and looked at the drawer without touching it.
She thought about the woman with the blond hair, whose name she'd never let herself learn on purpose.
She thought about six years of anniversaries, one Christmas where Cain had ridden two hundred miles through a snowstorm to be home in time to watch her open presents, and hated that even now, even furious, even betrayed down to the bone, she could not make her memory of him into only one thing.
That was the part nobody warned you about. The anger was almost a relief, clean and fuel-hot. It was the missing that ambushed her at odd hours, the reflex of wanting to tell him something funny before she remembered there was no one on the other end of that reflex anymore.
She closed the drawer without finishing the papers, same as she had every night for two months, and told herself tomorrow.
Forty minutes away, in a house on Larkspur that hadn't changed a single piece of furniture in eight months, Cain sat on the porch with a fourth unsent letter and watched the road like she might come up it, even though he knew by now that she wouldn't.
Later that week, closing up alone, Wren found herself standing in front of the shop's small localauthors shelf, rearranging titles that didn't need rearranging, and caught her own reflection in the darkened window.
She looked, she thought, like a woman still waiting for permission to stop treading water.
She'd built the shop, built Reyna's friendship, built a whole functioning life out of eight months of raw material.
What she hadn't built yet was any clear sense of what came after simply surviving, and the thought of that unanswered question followed her up the stairs to her apartment that night, settling into the quiet the way it always did once the day's small distractions ran out.
Some nights the missing arrived without warning, ambushing her in the middle of ordinary tasks.
She'd reach for her phone to send him a photo of something absurd she'd seen, a dog wearing a raincoat, a customer's spectacular parallel parking failure, before remembering, each time freshly, that the reflex belonged to a marriage that no longer existed.
The forgetting-and-remembering happened less often as the months passed, but it never fully stopped, and she'd come to understand it as simply one more permanent feature of the landscape she was learning to live inside, like a scar that no longer hurt but never quite disappeared either.
Reyna, watching her that same afternoon, finally set down the box of returns entirely and came to sit beside Wren at the register.
"You know, when I hired on with Dot all those years back, I was going through something myself.
Wasn't infidelity. Was just a marriage that had quietly stopped working, the kind that dies slow instead of all at once.
I remember thinking this shop saved me, in its own small way.
Gave me something to build instead of something to mourn. "
"Did it work? The saving?"
"Mostly. Still miss what I thought I had, some days.
But I built a whole life around this place instead, and most days that life feels like enough.
" Reyna squeezed her hand. "I think that's all any of us can really do, honestly.
Build something worth showing up for, and let the missing exist alongside it instead of pretending it isn't there. "
Wren carried that conversation with her for the rest of the week, finding in it a kind of permission she hadn't realized she needed, permission to keep grieving what she'd lost while still, simultaneously, building something new out of the wreckage.
The following month brought the shop's first real test since Wren had taken ownership, a regional distributor threatening to drop her account over a paperwork dispute that had nothing to do with anything she'd done and everything to do with Dot's old, informal bookkeeping habits finally catching up with the transition.
Wren spent three sleepless nights untangling the mess herself, refusing to call anyone for help, needing, in some stubborn, private way, to prove to herself that she could solve a genuine crisis entirely on her own strength.
She did solve it, eventually, and the small, hard-won victory mattered more to her than almost anything else from those early months, evidence that whatever else had been taken from her, her own competence remained entirely, stubbornly intact.
Wren's mother called every Sunday during those early months, a standing ritual neither of them ever formally arranged but both quietly relied on, and their conversations, at first strained and careful around the edges of the divorce, gradually loosened into something more like the easy closeness they'd shared before Wren's marriage had absorbed so much of her attention and independence.
"I like hearing about the shop," her mother told her once.
"You sound like yourself again when you talk about it.
Haven't heard that particular voice in years, honestly, not since before Cain. "
The observation landed harder than her mother probably intended, a quiet confirmation of exactly how much of herself Wren had let recede during the marriage, and she carried it with her afterward as one more piece of evidence for the account she was building, deliberately or not, of who she wanted to become on the far side of all of it.