"It was a long conversation," Wren said. "Without very many words."
Bea's expression achieved a new register of delight.
"Bea."
"I'm not saying anything."
"You're doing a face."
"It's just my face."
Wren picked up her coffee. It was her flat white, made exactly as she liked it, and she was not going to think about that right now. "The thing is—" She stopped. Started again. "I'm in something with Freddie, clearly, and I don't know what it is yet. And I'm also still—I still have feelings about whoever's been writing to me. And those are real, too. And I don't know what to do with two real things at the same time when they're pointing in different directions."
Bea was quiet for a moment. This was unusual enough to be notable. "How did you feel? Last night. With Freddie."
Wren thought about it. About the amber light and both his arms and the low register of his honest voice. "Safe," she said. "I felt present."
Bea nodded slowly. "And your admirer?"
"He feels…" She looked at the display, not seeing it. "He feels like a warm room from the outside. Like looking in through a window at something you want."
Bea was turning her cup in slow rotations.
"What?" Wren said.
"Nothing."
"Bea."
"I'm just thinking." She looked at the window, at the cart outside, at Freddie's navy awning and the chalk menu board and the precise way the counter was arranged. Then she turned back to Wren. "You know what's interesting about Freddie?"
"He's going to be the subject of this sentence whether I say yes or no."
"He never talks about himself. Have you noticed?"
But he had talked about himself. He'd told Wren some of his story.
"He seems to know a lot about you. He knew you were going to Oliver's vet visit before you'd mentioned it. He knew how you took your coffee before you'd told him."
Wren opened her mouth. Closed it. "That's just—" She considered this. "Some people are like that. Observant. It's just how he is."
Bea looked at her with the particular expression she wore when she was giving someone time to hear what they'd just said. "Is it?"
The word sat in the air between them, mild and specific and not quite willing to be dismissed.
Wren set her coffee down on the counter. She looked at the display, which was still wrong. She looked at the window, where the cart was visible in the morning light, already busy, a woman in a red coat accepting a cup with both hands.
There was a thing that wanted to be thought, at the edge of her mind; a shape that hadn't fully resolved yet, an outline shecould sense without being able to see clearly. She approached it and then didn't approach it, the way you didn't look directly at something faint because looking directly made it disappear.
She picked up the Mary Oliver. "I'll think about it," she said.
Bea received this with the grace of a woman who had won the exchange without pressing the advantage and turned to hang up her coat.
Oliver came in at half-past eleven, which was later than his usual visit. He explained before she could ask that he'd had another long night at a farm out past the ridge and had come directly from there to his office and had approximately four hours of paperwork sitting on his desk waiting to be given his full attention.
"I just wanted to stop in," he said, looking slightly hollowed around the eyes with the handsomeness of a man who functioned well on insufficient sleep. "See if the Fitzgerald box set had come in."
"It's in the back."
