CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Freddie had not slept.
This was not, in itself, unusual. Freddie had a complicated relationship with sleep that predated Valor City and would likely outlast it. But this particular sleeplessness was new. It was not the restless, cycling kind. It was not the kind that replayed events in search of different outcomes. It was simpler than that and worse: he was awake because he was certain about something.
The main street in early morning held onto the certainty that something was different today. Mrs. Finch came first, as she always did; seventy-three, sharp eyes, the wiry energy of a woman who had outlasted several decades of other people's low expectations. She had a standing order: a dark roast, two sugars. This morning he mentioned that the new Ethiopian single-origin had come in. She tried a sip. She approved. She paid and walked on toward the church where she did something voluntary three mornings a week.
Danny Park from the hardware store came at half past seven with his teenage son. Danny ordered two hot chocolates. The son had earbuds in and looked at the menu board as if it was a word problem. Freddie handed them their drinks. Danny clapped hisson once on the shoulder as they walked on, the automatic affection of a man who had forgotten what it felt like to be sixteen and was grateful for it.
The stroller moms came in a cluster at ten past eight. Freddie had learned their names in the first two weeks because small towns operated on names and he had understood this immediately. June, Patricia and the one everyone called Dolly, which was not her name but had been her nickname since primary school. They were arguing about something they'd heard on a podcast. They were always arguing about something. He made three chai lattes, and they went on their way.
He made coffees. He cleaned surfaces that did not need cleaning. He watched the street conduct its morning business in the way that small towns did. The postman did his round with the efficiency of a man who knew exactly whose door would open before he knocked. Two of the Purple Heart Ranch men in civvies, heading toward the diner for breakfast, one of them laughing at something the other had said.
At 10:47am the door of Pages & Prose opened.
She was wearing the rust cardigan, the one that did something to the color of her hair. Her glasses were slightly crooked in the way that meant she'd pushed them up with one finger while reading and not straightened them afterward. She had her hands in her cardigan pockets. She crossed to him without looking at him and then, when she reached the counter, looked directly at him.
"Flat white," she said.
"Yes," he said.
He pulled the shot, steamed the milk, and poured with the attention he gave every cup. He set the cup on the counter. She took it. They looked at each other.
He could not have said afterward how long it lasted. Long enough. Long enough that the morning quiet of the street wasperceptible around it, the distant sound of a delivery truck somewhere, a bird doing something in the eaves of the baker's. She was looking at him the way she'd looked at him on the pavement last night; with that quality of attention that was not searching so much as already arrived somewhere and deciding what to do with what it found there.
He said nothing.
She said nothing.
She turned and walked back to the shop. The door closed.
He turned back to the espresso machine and stood looking at it for approximately four seconds.
Then his next customer arrived. A young man he didn't know, a student type, a laptop bag. Freddie made him a coffee and gave him his change and continued existing, which was the only option available.
The afternoon wore on.
He made a flat white for a woman who was visiting her daughter. A black coffee for the man from the accountant's office who came every afternoon at three without fail. A pot of tea for two elderly men who sat at the small fold-out table he kept beside the cart and talked for forty minutes about something that may have been local politics or may have been a feud that preceded the current century.
Through the window of Pages & Prose, he could see, intermittently, the movement of the shop. Wren's auburn head at the counter, the warm amber of the lighting inside, Heathcliff a gray shape in the front window. Normal. All of it normal.
At 5:58pm, he was beginning the close-down.
He heard the bookshop's door. He straightened from the storage compartment he'd been arranging and turned. She was crossing to him with her coat on. Her hands were in her pockets. An expression showed that she had made a decision. She stopped at the counter. She looked at him.
"Will you come inside? So we can talk."
The last of the amber light was behind her. The street going blue around the edges as the day conceded the point to evening. He locked the cart. He folded the awning. He followed her in.
Pages & Prose in the late evening was different from Pages & Prose in the day. The amber lamplight gave it the quality of something that had turned inward, the street locked outside, the books warm on their shelves. Heathcliff was a gray presence in the armchair who opened one eye at Freddie's entrance and then, apparently satisfied, closed it again.
Wren stood near the counter. She turned to face him.
He stood in the space between the door and the first shelf.
She opened her mouth. Nothing came.
He looked at her. He had things to say. He had been composing and discarding them for seventeen hours, had three pages of attempts in the notebook that he had not brought and was grateful he had not brought because they would have been wrong, all of them wrong, paper wrong. The thing that was needed here was not paper.
