Please don't come looking for the man behind the curtain. Let him love you from the shadows. Let that be enough.
"More," she said, "would be any one piece of evidence that couldn't theoretically be a coincidence."
The shop emptied by five. Bea left at half past, with the reluctance of someone who would have stayed if asked, and Wren didn't ask because she wanted the quiet and the familiar weight of closing time — the dimming of the front lights, the soft commerce of locking up, Heathcliff conducting his evening audit of the shelves.
She moved through the routine on muscle memory. Cash drawer. Front door. Display adjusted. Recommendation wall straightened. Heathcliff, from his shelf, watched her with the unreadable patience of a creature that already knew everything and had decided not to say.
Wren sat down in the reading chair and opened the envelope of the tenth letter in the lamplight.
She read it twice. Then a third time. Then she sat with it in her lap and looked out at the dark window and the empty cobblestones where the coffee cart had been, and the feeling in her chest was something she didn't have a precise word for. Not happiness, though it was in the neighborhood. Something wider than happiness. Something that had weight.
Somewhere out there, he was watching her. Not in a way that frightened her. The letters had never frightened her. They weretoo careful for that, too considered, too full of a particular quality of attention that felt more like reverence than pursuit. But close.
He was close enough to read what she wrote on a Monday morning. Close enough to hear her when she recommended books aloud. Close enough to know her in the specific way that the letters knew her. But he didn't want to come any closer. And that made her feel lonelier that she had felt since she'd found out her fiancé was cheating on her with the one person she had confided in since she was a girl.
