CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The trouble with restlessness was that it needed somewhere to go.
Wren had closed the shop at six, locked the door, turned the sign, and then stood in the middle of the floor for approximately thirty seconds with no clear plan. Heathcliff had watched her from the armchair with the patience of a cat who understood that humans sometimes needed a moment to understand what they were doing.
She had decided on the back shelves. The natural history section had been bothering her for two weeks. It wasn't wrong, exactly, but not right either. The organization was logical but not intuitive, the kind of arrangement that made sense to a cataloguing brain and less sense to a browser's hand reaching for something without knowing what. She'd been meaning to rethink it. Tonight, with the lights low and the street outside going dark and her head running its circular route through the last two weeks of her life, it seemed like the right task. Specific enough to occupy her hands. Open-ended enough not to require full concentration.
She put on the small speaker she kept in the back room—something quiet, piano, the kind of music that existed to give silence a shape—and began.
The shop settled around her as it always did after closing, becoming a different version of itself. In the day, Pages & Prose was public, permeable, the door opening and closing on the cold and the warmth of people who needed things. After closing, it became hers more completely—the amber lamplight from the two working pendants, the wood of the shelves going warm in it, the smell of old paper and the evening's last tea rising from the mug she'd left on the counter. Heathcliff relocated from the armchair to the top of the fiction shelves by unknown means and looked down at her with proprietary calm.
She moved the Attenborough. She moved the Fabre. She stood back and looked at the gap and put the Fabre back.
She was thinking about Freddie, which she had been doing with increasing frequency and decreasing pretense that she wasn't. She was thinking about the night in the shop—the amber and both his arms—and the morning after, when she'd moved the display three times and eventually understood that what she was actually doing was trying to put things in their right place when the thing that needed placing wasn't on any shelf. She was thinking about the smile through the glass, and Oliver's knowing non-comment, and Bea'sis it?which had been sitting in her chest like a splinter she kept forgetting about and then remembering at inconvenient moments.
She moved the Durrell. Better. She stood back and considered.
Through the front window, in her peripheral vision, there was still a light on at the cart.
Freddie was sitting on the cart's step—the fold-down one, the small platform he used for storage access—with his jacket on and a book in his hand and his head bent over it in thespecific attitude of a man who was genuinely reading rather than performing reading. The street around him was dark, the other shops long closed, and the cart's small working light was the only illumination on that stretch of cobblestone. He had not moved in the time she'd been watching, which meant he had been there for—she did not know how long. Long enough.
She looked at him for a moment. She put down the natural history book she was holding and went to the window. She knocked on the window.
He looked up immediately. Not startled, more as though some peripheral attention had been waiting for exactly this. His eyes found her through the glass, and she watched the small adjustment of his expression: recognition, and something that moved through quickly and settled into the quieter thing.
She held up one finger; wait. She went to the door. She unlocked it and opened it onto the cold October night, and the air came in sharp and real and smelling of woodsmoke.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," he said. He was still on the step, book closed now, one thumb marking his page.
"You're still here."
"I'm still here."
A beat. An October leaf crossed between them in a lazy arc.
"How was your day?" she asked.
"Fine." He looked at her. "Yours?"
"I've been reorganizing the natural history section."
He nodded, as though this were a completely sufficient answer to the question, as though he understood entirely why a person might spend their closing hours rearranging natural history books, which she found—as she found many things about him—both unremarkable and remarkable simultaneously.
"Come in," she said.
The book went into his jacket pocket. It was not a large book, but a small one. He came up the steps and through the door, and she closed it behind him on the cold.
The shop received him the way it did now, without drama. Heathcliff looked down from the top of the fiction shelves. Looked at Freddie. Looked away. Did not, notably, hiss.
"Tea?" she asked.
"Can't stand the stuff."
"Oh. I guess maybe I should start stocking root beer if…" Wren let that trail off, unsure if they were headed down that path.
"I'd like that," he said, as though he were inviting himself on the journey.
