CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Wren had not planned to walk home with Freddie. It had simply happened, the way things sometimes did in his company; without discussion, without decision. One moment they were on the pavement outside the town hall, and the next they were walking in the same direction, and neither of them had said anything about it.
She didn't mind.
This was, she reflected, one of the more remarkable things about Freddie Gallagher: she didn't mind the quiet with him. She had spent years of her life in quiet that felt like abandonment. Preston's silences had always carried a quality of absence, of being in a room with someone who had already left it.
Freddie's quiet was different. It was inhabited. He was present in it, thinking in it. She could feel the thinking the way you could feel warmth from a fire without being told the fire was lit.
The main street was quiet around them, the shops dark and sealed, their reflections ghosted in the black windows. Wren was watching the pavement with the mild attention of a woman whose mind was elsewhere when Freddie said it.
"Glass."
His hand found her elbow, steering her two inches left. She looked down. A broken bottle, spread across the stone in small bright pieces, she absolutely would not have seen. He had simply seen it and moved her and continued walking, as though people worth protecting were always worth protecting and this required no commentary.
She was still thinking about this when the pavement narrowed at the old grain merchant's building, and she became aware, by the shift in the air beside her, that Freddie had changed position. Half a step, nothing dramatic. But he was now between her and the road, the street side, and she looked at him and looked at the road and understood what he had done.
"If a car hops the curb, it has to go through me first."
She laughed. She couldn't help it. The laugh came from somewhere below decision-making, the genuine unguarded kind, the one that happened when something was both absurd and completely, entirely serious at the same time. The sound of it went up into the cold air and dispersed.
Freddie was looking ahead, his profile in the lamplight. The strong jaw, the neat beard, the particular quality of his attention that was always directed somewhere specific. Often at her, even when he wasn't looking directly at her, she knew she had his attention.
Wren stopped walking. She didn't decide to. Her feet simply declined to continue while she was processing this.
Freddie stopped a half-step later and turned to look at her.
She looked back, and she was suddenly doing the thing she'd been half-doing for weeks without acknowledging she was doing it; she was really looking at him. Not cataloguing him for the investigation, not noting him as a peripheral presence, not filing him under inexplicable. Just looking.
Freddie had shown up. That was the thing, the fundamental thing she had somehow not assembled into a single clear thought until this precise moment on this precise stretch of pavement. He had shown up every single morning with her flat white made without being asked. He had done the tasks on her list and then done the ones that weren't on her list because they needed doing. He had noticed glass she would have walked through and said he'd stand between her and certain death.
Wren thought about the rain, about the umbrella. About how he went out of his way to walk her home, even with a limp.
The gratitude moved through her so quickly it became something else before she'd had time to name it.
She rose on her tiptoes.
She hadn't planned it. The impulse arrived, and she didn't question it. She leaned forward and up. Just slightly. The small wobble of it as her balance adjusted?—
Freddie's hand came to her waist. Instant, unhesitating. Not pulling her toward him. Just steadying. His palm was warm even through the layers of her coat. Because she had teetered and Freddie would never let her fall when he could prevent it And even this—even this small reflex—was so entirely him, so entirely the quality of attention she had been living next to for weeks without fully understanding what she was living next to, that she stopped thinking about it and she pressed her lips to his.
Freddie went very still.
For one second he was simply there—warm, solid, present—and she was kissing him and the night was cold around them and the lamplight was amber and the cobblestones gleamed and she was aware of all of this only distantly, through the more immediate awareness of his hand at her waist and the slight roughness of his beard and the fact that this was the least complicated she had felt in months.
Then he kissed her back.
His hand drew her closer. Not much. Just enough. Just closing the last distance. And the other hand found her lapel without her seeing it move. And he kissed her with the same quality he brought to everything: careful, completely attentive. As though she were something worth paying attention to. As though she had always been.
She made a sound she hadn't planned. Her fingers found the front of his jacket.
The street remained quiet around them. Someone's chimney sent woodsmoke drifting past. The lamplight continued its patient work.
He pulled back first. Wren found that disappointing. She hadn't been ready to stop.
Her heels were on the pavement. His hand was still at her waist. The air between their faces was cold and close, and she was looking at him. At the gray eyes that gave away nothing and somehow everything. And her heart was doing something she didn't have immediate vocabulary for.
"I'm sorry," he said.
