Chapter 4
She lifted Mildred’s bag off the hook by its strap.
For forty years, her grandmother had carried this bag to library board meetings and places Wren would never know the inside of, and Wren had brought it everywhere with her this week.
Mildred had kept nothing in there, always emptying it out each night, but there was now a pen and a folded receipt from the bodega on her corner.
The elevator took her down, and she walked out of the lobby into a cold the building’s dry warmth had let her forget.
Phoenix Ridge’s harbor was ten minutes downhill from Hale Capital.
Wren stuffed her hands into her coat pockets and made her way toward it.
The thing she had been circling around all afternoon surfaced in the front of her mind.
It was the cadence that tipped her off. Wren had asked, before she left work, whether to keep the Thursday meetings next quarter, even with scheduling conflicts, and Cordelia hadn’t even paused to consider the question before answering.
Six years of reading executives had taught her that the thing they wouldn’t let you in on was never the small thing.
She looked at the week as a whole: the memos a first-week assistant wouldn’t be asked to work on and the twelve-page NDA that was far more extensive than the job warranted.
None of this was an assistant’s job. Sure, there was evidence of the restructuring she was told about, but underneath, there was something else that was being concealed.
Wren forced herself to stop following the mental thread.
She had signed her discretion and intended to keep it.
She certainly wasn’t going to walk into that office next week with a theory no one had asked her to have.
Whatever Cordelia was hiding would surface in its own time or it wouldn’t; either way, she would keep doing her job the best she could.
At the bottom of the hill, the wind whipped off the water with nothing obstructing it. The dogwoods along the path had opened in the last few days, showing off their white and dusty pink flowers, and she caught their scent when the air shifted downwind. She turned east and continued walking.
The working docks ran east for a few hundred feet before the waterfront gave way to the town.
She walked them, the wind stronger on her back now.
The fishing boats were in for the night, tied off and dark.
She passed the marine supply store, still with its lights on, someone at the counter going over something on a clipboard.
Past it, a small seafood restaurant kept its windows lit, and two women sat at a table by the door with a bottle of wine between them as they leaned in toward each other.
Wren didn’t slow down. She eventually came to the end of the docks and turned up away from the water and onto the cobblestone streets.
Downtown started a block up from the harbor.
The brick buildings rose three and four stories.
The shop fronts along the bottom, the independent bookstore and wine shop, were closed and shuttered for the evening.
The street was wide and lined with maples just starting to leaf out, the old lamps along it throwing warm light down the block.
A few people were out milling around, but not many.
Wren came to the corner. The building on it was Victorian in style with two stories, the only one of its kind on the whole block—white clapboard with deep green trim, the trim peaking out around a wide bay window, and a painted-ladies house wedged in among the brick.
Flower baskets hung along the front, and a chalkboard stood out on the sidewalk with a looping script that Wren didn’t stop to read.
The door was a deep, dusty purple that reflected the lamplight, and above it, on a brass-edged sign in small letters: Lavender’s Cafe.
Wren had passed it three times since February and never had a reason to go in, but she pushed open the purple door anyway.
The bell over the door chimed a short note. She noticed the warmth first, then the smell—homemade bread and coffee, with soft notes of cardamom and lavender underneath it. She let the door fall shut behind her as she stepped fully inside.
Inside, the cafe was one long room with the bar running down the right-hand wall.
The floor was old wood gone soft underfoot.
The tables were mismatched and none of them ornate, but every one of them was in use.
Two deep armchairs sat at the bay window with a low table between them.
A long communal table ran down the middle of the space.
Plants hung from the exposed beams at uneven heights, real ones, grown a little wild.
The walls were lit low and warm, the bar brighter—dark wood with a brass rail along the bottom, a row of taps, and bottles ranged on the shelves behind it without the squared-off precision of a chain.
At the near end stood a glass case with what was left of the day’s baked goods in it: two scones and the heel of something dense and dark.
Behind all of it, from a kitchen Wren couldn’t see, came the smell of freshly baked bread.
It was past eight, and the Friday crowd had whittled down to the people with nowhere else they needed or wanted to be.
Five women sat at the communal table, a board of bread and cheese between them and a bottle of wine going around.
One of them laughed in the way that turned the other heads to look and smile at her.
A couple had the armchairs at the window, the two women leaning in close over the low table, a hand resting on a knee, talking too quietly to hear.
Another woman sat near the back with a paperback held up to the light.
Two stools down the bar, a woman read a hardcover with a glass at her elbow.
One stool was empty, and Wren took it. She set her grandmother’s bag against the rail at her feet then unbuttoned her coat.
The woman behind the bar finished pouring a drink at the far end, counted change back in a waiting hand, and came down to greet Wren.
The woman was somewhere near sixty, broad through her face, and graying auburn hair pinned up loose with a pencil run through it.
She wore a sweater the color of wet moss, and she had silver rings on most of her fingers.
“I haven’t seen you in here before,” she said, her voice warm and sure. “I’d remember.”
“First time,” Wren said.
She looked at Wren a moment longer than a bartender needed to, as if she were assessing her. “Long week,” she said finally. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Then not the lemonade.” The woman was already reaching under the bar. What she set down was small and dark in a heavy glass. “This’ll do you more good. On me.” She watched Wren. “I’m Lavender.”
“I’m Wren.”
“Wren,” Lavender repeated, as if committing her name to memory. “Welcome in, Wren. Nobody in here needs a thing from you tonight, so you just sit and enjoy.” She went back down the bar to her work.
Wren wrapped her hand around the glass. It was warmer than she had expected it to be.
Lavender must have kept it near a heat source.
She took a drink. It was dark and a little herbal, but not too sweet.
And it happened to be the first thing stronger than coffee that she had had in three months.
The warmth trailed down through her and settled in her stomach.
She looked around the room. It was full of women on a Friday night, and Wren realized it was the first time since she’d been in a space like this in more than a year.
She drank the liquid slowly and left her phone in her pocket, choosing instead to stay present.
There was low music that threaded through the din of conversation, turned down far enough that you had to go looking for it, but Wren heard the faint sound of a piano in it.
She watched the bottle be passed around the communal table and the two at the window who had eyes for no one but each other.
She watched Lavender work the whole bar—a few words exchanged with one woman, a refill for another—and her rings catching the light when her hands moved.
The whole room seemed to rearrange around her effortlessly. Wren continued to nurse her drink.
The woman sitting two stools down from Wren finished a chapter, slid a bookmark between the pages, and laid the book face-down on the bar.
A hardcover, the dust jacket worn soft at the corners and the spine turned away where Wren couldn’t make out the title.
She picked up her own glass, something pale in a tumbler, and turned a little on her stool to face Wren.
“You’re new,” she said.
“Guilty. I’ve been here for a couple of months now.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“The Bay Area,” Wren said mechanically. “Boston before that.”
The woman nodded. “What brought you here to Phoenix Ridge?”
Wren paused, considering how much to tell this strange woman in a bar. She opted to hedge. “For the quiet, mostly. And it’s a smaller city than I’m used to. I wanted that.”
“Fair enough. I’ve lived here my whole life and haven’t really considered living anywhere else.” She tipped her head at the people behind them. “And I like this bar.”
“I can see why,” Wren said, her posture loosening slightly.
“Well, enjoy.” The woman gave her a small smile, then swiveled on her chair and opened her book again.
Wren smiled in return then went back to her drink. When she finished, she didn’t order another and instead left a folded twenty on the bar, more than the drink would’ve come to, then stood, shrugging on her coat.
“Night, Wren,” Lavender called from down the bar, not missing a beat. “Come back when you can stay a bit longer.”
“I will,” Wren said, and something in her bones knew it wasn’t an empty platitude and that she would be back eventually. She picked up her bag from the floor and slung it over her shoulder.
“Good night,” the woman with the book said, offering Wren another smile.
“Good night.”
She pushed through the purple door, the chime bidding her farewell, and stepped outside in the spring night.
She went back down toward the water and along the harbor toward home.
The wind had shifted again when she was inside.
It came off the water harder now and bore straight through her coat.
She put her chin down into her collar against it.
The blooming dogwoods were behind her now, and she caught them once before the wind shifted again, then not again.
The seafood restaurant had closed. The window where the two women had leaned over their wine was dark now, and the wooden chairs were upside down on the tables inside.
There was no one on the harbor walkway, not at this hour on a chilly Friday night in April.
Somewhere past the breakwater, the foghorn sounded low and then let off.
Wren wasn’t in a hurry. The warmth of the drink was still in her chest, just lower now.
She walked with her hands in her pockets as the town receded behind her.
Partway along the empty stretch of sidewalk, though, she stopped.
She didn’t have a particular reason she could point to.
There wasn’t anything ahead of her and nothing behind.
She stood on the path with the ocean on one side and dark slips on the other with the wind whipping against her.
For three months, she had been constantly on the move. But here, now, she let herself stand still, allowing life to catch up around her.