His nod was stiff, but Wren didn't think he didn't mean it. It was the awkward nod of a little boy who didn't know what to do with his feelings.
Wren picked up her cup. He nodded again and turned back to the machine. She walked back to her shop, telling herself that the slight wrongness in her chest was nothing —was definitely nothing —was the cold probably or the anticipation about Oliver or the fact that she'd had her cardigan buttoned wrong for forty minutes before she'd noticed.
Oliver arrived at half-past eleven.
Wren heard the door and turned from the shelf she'd been rearranging. She'd been rearranging it for twenty minutes, which was ten minutes more than it needed. And there he was, the easy height and the comfortable smile, his jacket carryinga faint smell of the outdoors, cold air and something that was probably horse.
Her heart did a complicated thing. Not the dramatic lurch she'd been half-braced for. It was more a gathering, the sensation of a woman collecting herself before something important.
"Oliver," she said, and managed to say it normally.
"Afternoon." He came to the counter, looked at the shelf she'd been rearranging. "New display?"
"Reorganizing." She came around to the shop floor. "So," she prompted. "What brings you in?"
"New stock day, right?"
Wren nodded. And then waited as he perused the shelves. He would bring it up. He'd had the letter since she'd slipped it under the door of his practice yesterday evening, so he would have found it this morning, or perhaps last night if he'd gone back to check on anything, and he would bring it up because Oliver was direct and kind and he would not leave her in suspense about something like this.
He didn't bring it up.
He asked about the winter stock schedule instead. Wren answered. He listened. He picked up a second book from the display—the new Maggie O'Farrell—and turned it over to read the back.
"How's the market committee going with Freddie?" he asked. "Nearly there?"
"Nearly." She watched him, still, searching for—something. Some flicker of awareness. Some quality of careful avoidance that would indicate there was a subject he was deliberately not raising. "Two weeks. It's going to be good, I think. Freddie and I work well together."
"Good man, Freddie," Oliver said this with easy sincerity, looking at the back of the O'Farrell. "He seemed a bit off this morning, actually. When I stopped for coffee."
"He seemed it to me too."
Oliver nodded, still looking at the book. He had not brought up the letter. He had shown no indication that there was a letter to bring up. He had the settled manner of a man who had not recently read something that altered the state of his heart.
Wren made herself ask: "Did you—were you at the ranch last night?"
"God, yes." He looked up, ruefully. "They've got a new mare. Difficult delivery, nearly four in the morning, before we were sure she was all right. Beautiful foal, though. Gray, with one white sock." He set the book down. "I've barely been home. I'll be going back tonight."
He hadn't been in the office. Which meant he hadn't found the letter, which meant he had no idea that Wren had spent a significant portion of the previous evening composing and recomposing a letter asking him to admit his feelings for her.
The letter was sitting inside his foyer, or in a pile he hadn't touched, perfectly preserved in its ignorance, a small paper time bomb waiting for a man who had been at a ranch until four in the morning assisting a horse.
"Oh," Wren said. "Good. That she's all right. The mare."
"Yes." He smiled. "Worth the lost sleep."
She smiled back. It was a completely genuine smile. They finished the conversation with the ease of people who genuinely liked each other. She rang up the O'Farrell. He said something nice about the display. She said something nice about the foal. The door closed behind him with its familiar sound.
She stood at the counter.
"Right," she said under her breath to no one.
The letter was still out there. Unread. This was, on reflection, probably fine. It bought her time, which she had not wanted when she was composing it at midnight, and which she now wanted very much. She needed to think. She needed to think about whether she was right, and whether Oliver was actually the most likely candidate, and whether she had considered all the?—
Movement outside.
Through the front window, as she turned to go back to the shelf, she caught sight of Freddie. Not at the cart—he'd stepped away from it, or perhaps it was the angle—but facing the shop, facing her, his hands still and his expression doing the thing it did when he thought no one was watching him. She had seen this expression approximately twice. She had not known what to do with it either time.
He was looking at her with an intensity that had no obvious explanation.
Her heart did the complicated thing again, more definitively this time, a full skip, the physical sensation of a rhythm interrupted.
Then he looked away. He turned, with the economy of movement that was just Freddie, reached for the cart's crossbar, and began to move it. Down the street—away from the bookshop, away from the space outside her window where it lived. She watched him go, the navy cart rolling smoothly on the cobblestones, until he turned the corner toward the diner end of the street and was gone.
