CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The street was quiet enough that Freddie could hear the chalkboard sign outside the bakery swinging on its hook across the way. He could hear the sound of the wind moving through the near-bare trees in the square at the end of the street, a dry rustling that was nothing like the sound the same trees made in summer. He could hear, from inside Pages & Prose, the low, friendly murmur of Wren and Bea's voices.
He was restocking the cup sleeves when the shop door opened. Just a few inches, the way it did sometimes when someone inside was talking toward the back and had nudged it with a hip. Warm air from inside, carrying the smell of the shop spilled out over the step.
"—can't explain it," Wren was saying, her voice carrying just far enough through the open gap. "It's not about the mystery anymore. It stopped being about the mystery weeks ago."
"Then what is it about?" Bea's voice, from further inside.
"I think—" Wren's voice shifted, dropping a half-register. "I think I might be in love with him. Whoever he is."
Freddie put down the cup sleeves. His hands simply stopped moving, set the sleeves on the counter with a soft sound, and didnot pick them up again. He was looking at the espresso machine—at the point where the steam wand joined the body of the machine—and he was very still.
"I know that sounds insane. But, Bea, he sees me. He actually sees me. He notices small things. Things I didn't know were noticeable."
The chalkboard sign swung. A leaf crossed the pavement in front of the cart.
"He has these—these feelings, clearly. Enough to write all of this, and he won't… He keeps sending these letters and staying hidden, and I keep waiting and…" The pause was longer this time. "It makes me feel like he doesn't think I'm worth it. Like I'm someone who's not worth the actual risk of coming face to face with."
Something moved through Freddie's chest that was not a physical sensation and was not comfortable.
"What if it's Oliver?" Bea said. "Just—consider. He was in the shop on Tuesday when you got that one?—"
"Then I'm going to tell him. I'm going to tell him that I know. That I—that however I feel about whoever has been writing to me, I need it to be real. I need him to be willing to say it to my face. I'm going to talk to Oliver. I'm going to tell him that I know, and that I need him to come out from behind the paper, and if he can't do that then—" She stopped herself. "I can't keep reading letters from someone who won't talk to me."
"Okay." Bea's voice was very gentle.
The door swung shut with its soft thump.
Freddie stood at the counter of his cart on a cold October morning on the main street of Valor City and did not move for four seconds. His next customer arrived: a man in a wax jacket, the kind who always ordered an Americano and never needed to be told the size, and Freddie messed up the order.
His hands were shaking. He burned his thumb. He didn't charge the customer, which was a good thing because he gave the man a lavender oat latte.
I think I might be in love with him.
Freddie had imagined—in the abstract, in the controlled distance of writing—that he knew what Wren thought about the letters. He had imagined appreciation, perhaps attachment, the pleasant warmth of being admired. He had not imagined those specific words in that specific voice, dropped low, unperformed, as though she'd said it by accident and then decided to keep saying it because it was true.
He doesn't think I'm worth it.
This was not accurate—was so entirely inaccurate that the word he was looking for was not even in the same address range as accurate—and it could not be corrected without saying so, and saying so required him to put down the portafilter and cross twelve feet of cobblestone and open a door and say words out loud in his own voice with his own name attached to them.
He knew this. He had always known this.
He didn't cover the distance.
He wiped the steam wand with a cloth that did not need wiping and looked at the door of Pages & Prose and thought, with perfect useless clarity: she is in there right now, this moment, deciding to tell the wrong man, because you cannot bring yourself to be the right one.
He sees me. He actually sees me.
He had seen her. He had seen her for seven weeks. He had written down his observations in ink that had cost him nothing in the moment and apparently everything in the aggregate, and now she was inside the shop deciding he didn't think she was worth the actual risk, and she was going to Oliver Hartley with her heart open, and Oliver was—probably still with the brunette he'd picked up at the bar the other night. Oliver was a goodperson who was going to be kind about this, which somehow made it worse.
Freddie's next customer arrived. A woman in a wheelchair who wanted a latte and a decaf. He concentrated hard on the order and managed to get them both right. His hands had mostly steadied by the time he handed them over. This was the thing about being good at your work: it occupied the body, gave it something to do that was not what the body actually wanted to do, which was apparently walk twelve feet and open a door and say?—
What, exactly?
This was where it always stopped.
He had three pages of possible what-exactly in the notebook under the counter. He had said none of them. He would continue, he understood with the bone-deep exhaustion of someone recognizing an old pattern, to say none of them, and Wren would go to Oliver, and Oliver would be confused and kind.
