CHAPTER NINETEEN
The front display had been perfectly adequate yesterday. The fall poetry collection, the Keats and the Neruda and the Mary Oliver, arranged by spine color in a gradient that went from deep burgundy through amber to a pale gold at the end. She had been pleased with it. She had stood back and looked at it and thought: yes, that's right.
This morning it was wrong and she was rearranging for the third time.
The Keats needed to be further left. Or further right. The Mary Oliver was too close to the edge. The amber-spined ones were fine, but the gold ones?—
She moved the gold ones.
She moved them back.
Heathcliff, in his window position, watched her with the expression of a cat who had already formed a complete theory of the situation and was waiting to be consulted.
"Don't," she told him.
He blinked.
"Reorganizing is a completely normal activity."
He turned to face the window instead, which was his version of declining to argue.
Wren moved the Keats back to its original position. She had been in something last night for which she still didn't have the right word. She had been in it in the amber lamplight of this exact room while Heathcliff pretended not to watch from the armchair. And Freddie had held her like she was—Freddie had held her like she was worth holding. Like the holding was not a transaction or a performance but just something he had decided to do with both arms and full attention.
She was in something with Freddie Gallagher.
She was also in love with whoever had been writing to her. That was real, too. That feeling was real.
These two things were both real simultaneously, and she had no framework for this.
"Right," she said to no one.
Bea arrived at nine-fifteen and knew within thirty seconds. This was not surprising. Bea had always had the perceptive quality of someone who understood emotional weather systems. She could read a room, read a person, read a silence and tell you what it had been hiding. It was, Wren had long suspected, why she was so good at graphic design: she saw the thing under the surface and made it visible.
She came through the door with her coat and her bag and a cardboard tray of two coffees from the cart—Freddie's cart, Wren registered this and then registered that she had registered this—and she looked at Wren and she looked at the display and she set the coffees on the counter.
"Tell me everything," she said.
"Good morning to you too."
"Wren."
Wren turned back to the display. Moved the Keats one inch to the left. "Something happened last night."
The sound Bea made was not a word. It was several feelings simultaneously expressed through a single syllable.
"After the committee meeting," Wren said. "He walked me home." She paused. "We kissed. On the pavement."
"Oliver?"
"Freddie."
"Freddie?"
Wren turned to find her with both hands around her coffee cup and the expression of someone experiencing genuine joy while also trying to process at speed.
"And then," Wren continued, because there was more and Bea would know there was more, "he came inside last night. After closing. And we—" She stopped.
Bea waited.
