CHAPTER ONE
The ninth letter arrived on a Tuesday.
Wren found it the way she found all of them; not looking. Or rather, looking for something else entirely. She'd been reaching for the Neruda collection to straighten it because it listed to the left when she spied it out of the corner of her eye. The letter was on the welcome mat at the front door. Just as the other eight had come to her.
She stood there for a moment with the letter in her hand and the Neruda still tilting. Then she opened it.
She read the letter standing between Poetry and Literary Fiction, her cardigan pulled close, her tea going cold on the counter behind her. Then she read it again. Then, because apparently twice was not sufficient, she read it a third time. By the end of the third time, her heart was acting like it had spent sixty minutes at the gym in the middle of a workday.
The letter was… different.
The others had been beautiful. She had eight of them in the cedar box under the shop counter, read and reread and occasionally taken out late in the evening when the shop was closed and the lamplight was warm and she was in the mood to feel things. They were literary and written in a hand that hadlearned penmanship back when it was taught in grade school, back before thumbs were used for a spacebar instead of simply to steady a pen or pencil. Curing and precise, except at the points where the feeling got away from him, where the letters opened up just a little, like a door left ajar. She'd read them enough times to know exactly which sentences did that.
But this one was different because of the book.
Halfway through, he'd referencedThe God of Small Things— a specific passage, a specific quality of attention, the kind of thing a reader said about a book only if it had actually done something to them. And then he'd written:I heard you recommend it to a customer last Tuesday. You said it was the book you'd give someone who needed to cry about something. I've been thinking about that ever since.
Last Tuesday.
Wren read that sentence again and felt the quiet lurch of it.
Pages & Prose occupied a narrow shop front on Valor City's main street.. The paint was deep teal-green, the gold lettering above the door slightly weathered in a way she'd decided was character rather than neglect, and the interior was — she knew, because Bea told her regularly — a lot. Low-beamed ceilings and amber pendant lighting and shelves that had multiplied over the years to the point where the back room now required navigating a memorable step down and a load-bearing stack of art books that Wren maintained were structural. The whole place smelled of old paper and new paper and the bergamot tea she brewed every morning without fail and the wooden smell of shelves that had been holding books for longer than she'd been alive.
She loved it with a ferocity that still surprised her, even now. And he had been here. He had been listening to her somewhere in the shop. He had to have been if he'd heard her recommend that particular book.
Not somewhere nearby in a general sense, not passing on the main street at the right moment. He had been inside Pages & Prose, or close enough to hear her through the open door, on a Tuesday afternoon, listening to a conversation she'd had with a woman who'd stood at the counter for twenty minutes describing a feeling she couldn't articulate while Wren pulled books until she found the right one. She remembered that Tuesday. She remembered the woman. She did not remember anyone else in particular.
Which meant she'd looked right at him and not known.
She folded the letter carefully along its original creases and tucked it into the pocket of her cardigan, against her ribs. She stood there for a moment in the quiet of the shop before it opened, the amber light falling warm across the spines of books, and took a very deliberate breath.
All right, she thought. That's that, then.
The letters had been a lovely mystery for six weeks. Something to find on quiet mornings, something to carry through the day, something to think about in the space between closing the till and locking the door. She'd been treating them as a gift; anonymous, improbable, the kind of thing that happened in the books she sold rather than the life she lived. She'd been, if she was being honest with herself, a little afraid to pull on the thread in case the answer was disappointing.
That was over now. She was going to find out who was writing to her.
The business of opening the shop was the same every morning, and she loved it for exactly that reason. First, the sign — flipped from CLOSED to OPEN at precisely nine o'clock, not before, because Dot Pemberton had once arrived at five to nine and stood outside in the wind looking aggrieved at not being serviced on her timetable.
Second, the lights. All of them, including the fairy lights along the poetry shelf that had been Bea's contribution and which Wren had complained about for two weeks before quietly admitting they were perfect.
Third, Heathcliff.
Heathcliff required his own step. He was a gray tabby of considerable size and considerable opinion, and he had arrived at Pages & Prose the day she had as a stray who had accepted a piece of Wren's lunch with the gracious air of someone doing her a favor. He'd been here ever since. He had that name because Wren had been in a Brontë phase when he arrived, and he responded to it approximately forty percent of the time. He slept on top of the fiction section by means she'd never fully established and woke every morning with the expression of a man who had several complaints about the management.
This morning he accepted her ear-scratch with minimal resistance, dropped from his shelf with the controlled inevitability of a small boulder, and took up his position on the window seat.
Wren watched him arrange himself against the glass. One paw tucked, chin lifted, the posture of a cat who considered surveillance a professional occupation. Wren went to put the kettle on.
She was reaching for the tea tin when she heard it: the familiar sound of wheels on cobblestones, the rhythm of the wobble to its left wheel. The navy coffee cart arrived every morning between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty, positioned itself on the section of pavement directly in front of her window, and remained there until half-past five. The man who operated it was tall and broad. He had dark auburn hair that curled slightly in the damp and a beard kept closer than his general aesthetic implied and a face that was, in Wren's private opinion, almost offensively interesting.
His name was Freddie Gallagher. She knew this because the cart had GALLAGHER in clean serif lettering on the side, and she'd confirmed it from Maggie, who knew everyone in Valor, within approximately forty-eight hours of their arrival. She also knew — again from Maggie, who operated as a one-woman municipal information service — that he'd come through Dylan's program at Purple Heart Ranch and liked it well enough to stay. That he'd built the cart himself. That he produced the best flat white in town by a margin that several people had described to her unprompted.
Wren could confirm this bit of gossip. She ordered a flat white every morning at eleven o'clock exactly. Never once did it disappoint.
She did not know much else about him, because Freddie Gallagher did not appear to volunteer information about himself. He accepted her order, made her coffee, handed it across the counter with the focused competence of someone for whom excellence was the baseline rather than the aspiration, and said — usually — nothing that wasn't transactional. When he did say something, it was brief and dry and didn't invite further comment.
This morning, she watched him set up the board, the soft chalk scrape of the day's menu being written. She smelled the first blast of steam from the wand, milky and sharp. She heard, she was fairly certain, him exchange three words with someone passing, which was roughly his average.
