CHAPTER TWO
Freddie had not thought about the letter once all morning.
This was not strictly true, but he'd found that if he stated a thing with sufficient internal conviction, it occasionally became manageable. Not true. Manageable. There was a difference, and at seven fifty-three on a Tuesday in October, with the steam wand cleaned and the grinder calibrated and the chalk menu board written in the block letters visible from across the street and different from the slant of his regular handwriting, manageable was sufficient.
He'd turned onto Main Street at ten past six the previous evening, when the shop lights had been off and the street quiet enough that his footsteps on the pavement had announced themselves more than he'd liked. He'd crossed the street with the letter already folded, already creased from being in his jacket pocket for three days while he decided whether to deliver it. He'd slipped the letter into her mail slot and turned away.
He didn't know what possessed him to place his hand on the door. Perhaps it was a glance at the lock. The lock on her front door was child's play — something he'd have to look into. Not that there was any danger in Valor. Not with so many activeduty, veterans, and nosy neighbors watching everything that everyone did.
But Freddie was good at stealth. It had been his job back in the service. He'd slipped back into the darkness of the predawn morning with no one the wiser.
And then he'd been not been thinking about it for fourteen hours.
The morning air was sharp enough to justify the heavy apron, the cobblestones still dark from the night's rain, the light coming in low and amber from the east and doing something to the shop fronts that a person with different priorities might describe as beautiful. Freddie's priorities were the temperature of the water and the ratio of the shot, and the angle of the pour. He noted the light in the way he noted most things: without comment, precisely, and for longer than necessary.
The cart was ready by eight twenty-two. He served Mrs. Petersen, who wanted an Americano, and the young man from the real estate office who wanted a double espresso, and the woman who jogged past every Tuesday and always looked surprised when she stopped, as though her legs had made the decision independently. He made their coffees and took their money and said the minimum required number of words.
The morning went about its business. At eight fifty-one, Oliver Hartley appeared at the end of the street. Freddie had the oat latte started before Oliver reached the cart. Oliver paid attention to a great many things. He was, in Freddie's assessment, a genuinely decent man who moved through the world with the uncomplicated ease of someone who'd never had particular cause to build defenses, which Freddie found simultaneously admirable and slightly exhausting.
"Morning," Oliver said, arriving at the counter with his hands in his coat pockets and his blond hair doing the samecooperative thing it always did. He had the look of someone the weather liked. "Cold one."
"Yes," said Freddie.
Oliver accepted the latte and paid, and then remained standing at the counter, which was his habit. Freddie had decided early on that this was not a character flaw so much as an inclination, and he'd made a separate peace with it.
"Your neighbor seems busy this morning." Oliver nodded toward Pages & Prose. "Had three customers as soon as the doors opened. I saw her through the window rearranging a display."
Freddie didn't say anything.
"She mentioned a Hilary Mantel I haven't read. Said it was — I can't remember exactly. Something about the right book for the right kind of thinking." He looked at his cup. "She has a way of describing books as if they're medicine."
"She's a bookseller," Freddie said. "It's the job."
Oliver looked at him with the calm, unhurried patience of a man who worked with large animals that could injure him and would apologize for getting in their way. "Right," he said pleasantly. "Of course. Have a good one, Gallagher."
The morning moved at its own pace, and Freddie moved with it. This was the thing about the cart that he hadn't anticipated when he'd built it. He'd built it as a thing to do, after the ranch, after the physical therapy, after the directionless months of being well enough not to need help and not yet clear enough to know what came next. He'd had the skills and the timber and the time, and building something with his hands had always been the fastest route from his head to something resembling equilibrium. He'd expected to sell the cart. He'd ended up behind it, because the alternative had been a kitchen table and his own company, and he'd had enough of both.
What he hadn't expected was Wren Banks.
He didn't think about her the way he thought about other things, with the clean linear logic of problems and solutions. She occupied a different kind of space. Less a thought than a fact, the way the cold was a fact, the way his limp was a fact. Simply there, present, requiring acknowledgement without offering resolution.
He went about his work. He did not stare. He noted things incidentally, the way a person notes the weather, and he filed them away in the notebook he kept under the counter. The notebook currently contained a list of every book she'd recommended aloud within his hearing, a record of the times she'd changed the window display, three and a half observations about the way she laughed that he'd written down at low points in his better judgment, and nine letters he'd drafted and delivered.
He was done with the letters. He'd decided it, specifically, nine times.
At eleven o'clock exactly, the shop door opened. He had the flat white started at ten fifty-eight, because she was always exactly on time, and in all the months he'd been here she had not once been forty seconds early or forty seconds late, and he respected this so completely that he'd stopped finding it remarkable. It simply was. Like the cold. Like the limp.
She came out in a rust-colored cardigan and the brown corduroy jacket she'd been wearing since the temperature dropped, her hair escaping from whatever she'd done with it in approximately the way it always escaped. Not messily, exactly, but as though it had made its own decision. She was carrying a small notebook, which was — he noted, without looking like he was noting — new.
She came to the counter and looked at the menu board, which she had never once needed to consult and was not consulting now. She looked at it the way some people looked attheir phone while they were thinking about something else: a place to rest her eyes.
He set the flat white on the counter.
She reached for it without looking at him, which was also usual. He'd had a theory, early on, that this was a form of deliberate impoliteness, and then he'd watched her do it to the postman and the woman from the bakery next door and Mrs. Petersen's husband on the one occasion he'd brought her coffee, and he'd concluded instead that Wren Banks accepted service with the uncomplicated expectation of someone who considered good work its own acknowledgement. She didn't say thank you the way most people said thank you — performatively, to fill the space. If she said it, she meant it.
She hadn't said it yet. She took a sip. Looked out at the street.
From beneath his lashes, Freddie watched the line of her profile, the slight furrow between her brows that meant her mind was elsewhere and working on something, and he busied himself with the cloth and the counter and the business of having no interior life worth mentioning.
