CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Freddie arrived at the committee room eight minutes early.
This was deliberate. He set out the updated booth map, the supplier confirmation sheets, and the revised music licensing documents he'd obtained after a forty-minute phone call with the county council. He aligned the papers with the edge of the table, which was not quite level.
He had been useful this week. Useful was manageable. Useful had edges and a defined scope and did not require him to talk too much. He had completed every task on the committee list. He had also completed three tasks that were not on the committee list, because they were obvious gaps and he was not capable of seeing an obvious gap and not filling it. The sound equipment contact, the insurance extension, the secondary waste collection that the original plan had somehow overlooked entirely. These were just things that needed doing. So he’d done them.
Now, with five minutes left until the meeting started, he sat down with nothing to do.
Wren arrived two minutes late. She was wearing a dark green coat over a cream blouse. Her hair was down for once, ormostly down. There was a clip at the back that had lost its grip on roughly half of what it was meant to be holding. She had her folders under one arm and her phone in the other hand, and she was reading something on the phone with the focused expression of someone who had been in motion all day and had not quite stopped. She pushed through the door, clocked Freddie, clocked the table, and then stopped completely.
She looked at the papers.
"You did the insurance extension," she said.
"It was on the list."
"It was on my list." She came further into the room, set her folder down, and picked up the insurance sheet to look at it. "How did you even?—"
"You left the planning folder on the committee room table last week. I made a note of the outstanding items."
She looked at him over the top of the paper. Her expression was doing several things at once, in the way her expressions often did, like a weather system that hadn't decided on its final form. "You went through my planning folder?"
"I read the first page. It was facing up."
"And then you sorted out the insurance extension."
"And the secondary waste collection. And the sound equipment liability form. That one was going to cause a problem if it wasn't done before the end of the month."
Wren put the paper down slowly. She was still looking at him. Freddie kept his expression neutral, because neutral was the mode he had selected and he was committed to it, and waited for her to say something.
"Thank you," she said.
"It needed doing," he said.
"A lot of people would have left it to me." She pulled out her chair and sat, flipping her folder open, but she was still looking at him with an expression that had settled into something hedidn't quite have a category for. "Because it was technically my job. They would have waited to be asked and then mentioned later that they'd been going to get to it."
"That's inefficient."
"Yes." A small smile appeared at the corner of her mouth. "It is."
The meeting ran an hour and twenty minutes, which was twelve minutes shorter than the previous one, which Freddie attributed to the fact that three of the six outstanding items had been resolved before it started. The final agenda item was the volunteer briefing schedule, which Wren had drafted and which required minimal discussion because it was thorough.
Freddie began collecting papers.
"Can I help?" Wren asked.
"I've got it."
She helped anyway. She gathered the extra copies into a stack with the quick competence of someone who dealt with paper as a primary medium. He took them from her and squared them against the table edge. For a moment, they were both standing on the same side of the table in the half-cleared room.
"I just…I wanted to say that you've been very great to work with. On this." She gestured vaguely at the room, the market, the general enterprise. "You do what you say you're going to do. And you do things nobody asked you to do because they needed doing, and you don't—" She stopped, started again. "You don't make me feel like I have to justify myself for being organized or for having opinions about things. You just—work with me. On the same level."
Freddie looked at her. He had not prepared for this either. The committee meeting had used up his entire allocation of words, and she was now presenting a further quantity of sincerity that required response.
"I'm not sure that warrants mention," he said carefully.
"It does, though." Her expression shifted into something quieter. "More than you'd think."
