CHAPTER SIX
The problem, Freddie had discovered in the last forty-three minutes, was her face.
He had spent the better part of seven weeks observing Wren Banks from a distance of approximately twelve feet, which had turned out to be exactly the right distance for maintaining the fiction that he had things under control. From twelve feet, through glass, in the amber light of a bookshop that was specifically designed to make everything inside it look like something you wanted, he had been able to catalogue her.
The way she moved between the shelves. The particular tilt of her chin when a customer said something she disagreed with. The unconscious way she tucked her hair back when she was reading something that had her full attention. He had been able to observe all of it and feel whatever it was he felt about it from a safe and manageable distance.
The committee room was eight feet by twelve. There was a folding table between them, and it was not helping.
Her face did things. That was the problem, stated plainly, which was how Freddie preferred to state problems, even when he had no intention of solving them. When she was thinking, something shifted behind her eyes. When she was wrong aboutsomething and heard a better argument, she didn't flinch. She just absorbed it. And there was a half-second of absolute stillness before she wrote it down and then underlined it twice. Freddie had found this so unexpectedly — so specifically — appealing that he'd had to look at the whiteboard for a moment to collect himself.
He had told her that the florals near the stage were a problem. He had been correct. She had not argued. She had nodded, precisely once, written it down, and moved on, and this had been somehow more destabilizing than if she'd fought him on it. He was used to being found difficult. He had built something of a life around it.
They were reaching the end of the vendor list when Wren's phone buzzed against the table.
She glanced down. Something shifted in her expression. It was a small, involuntary contraction. Her nose wrinkled. Then she smoothed it out with the deliberate absence of expression that meant she was making a decision not to have a reaction.
"Sorry. It's nothing." Wren set the phone face-down on the table and looked back at her notes. Then she picked it up again. Read something. Set it down harder than before.
"It's my best friend. Former best friend."
Freddie said nothing. He was very good at saying nothing. He had years of practice.
"She lied to me," Wren said, not to him, not to anyone, just said it into the middle of the table in the tone of someone who had opened a cabinet expecting one thing and found something else. "Well. A lie of omission. Which is the same thing." She looked up briefly, caught him looking, and there was a flicker of self-consciousness — quickly suppressed. "Lies of omission are the same as lies. Choosing not to tell someone something they have a right to know. That's a lie."
Freddie became very interested in the top corner of his notebook. The tenth letter was in his jacket pocket. He was suddenly aware of it with a specificity he hadn't been before; the slight weight of it, the fold, the way it sat against the inner lining two inches below his left shoulder. He had rewritten it in the particular small hours that seemed to produce his worst decisions, and he had been carrying it for two days waiting for the right moment to deliver it, and it had not occurred to him until this precise second, sitting across a table from Wren Banks while she said the wordliewith that specific heat, that the right moment was never going to arrive because there was no version of this that was not a lie of omission.
Nine letters. Anonymous. Delivered before sunrise. A woman who had just stated, clearly and without ambiguity, that choosing not to tell someone something was the same as lying.
He put his pen down.Any day now,he thought.You were going to stop any day now.
The door opened. Oliver appeared in the doorway with the expression of a man who had been looking for a different room and found himself in an unexpectedly populated one. He was still in his work clothes — the practical zip fleece of a vet who had clearly come straight from something involving a patient that couldn't tell him to wait — and he looked between Freddie and Wren with the mild bewilderment that was his default register.
"Sorry, I was looking for Mrs. Patel."
"I think she's gone for the night," said Wren. "I think we're done here as well, Freddie."
Wren gathered her items.
Oliver smiled at Wren, easy and unguarded, the smile of someone with nothing complicated going on. "I finally read that Hilary Mantel you recommended. You were completely right."
Something happened to Wren's face: a rapid recalibration. It was the same kind Freddie had been cataloguing all evening, butthis one was faster and less controlled. She sat up slightly and touched the edge of her folder.
"Was I? Which one?"
"Wolf Hall," Oliver said. "I started it at ten on Saturday and found myself still reading it at two in the morning in the kitchen."
"That's exactly what's supposed to happen," Wren said, and the expression on her face was the same one Freddie had watched from twelve feet away, in the amber light, through glass; the one that meant she was genuinely delighted, that this was the thing she cared about, the landing of the right book with the right person at the right time.
He had written her a letter about that once. The way she lit up. He hadn't sent that particular draft.
"I'll have to get a recommendation for whatever comes next," Oliver told her.
"I have three options for you." She was already half-turned toward her bag, the phone and the lie of omission apparently set aside entirely. "Come in this week and I'll put them aside."
"I will." Oliver looked at Freddie.
Wren watched the door for a moment. Her expression was something Freddie couldn't quite categorize — pleased, and also as if she was filing something away. Then she gathered her folder and capped her pen.
