CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The market was happening. She had done it! These people had trusted her and she wasn't going to let them down.
This was the thought that kept arriving as Wren moved through the booths, clipboard in hand, checking placement against the final map with the slightly dazed quality of someone who had planned something for long enough that its actual existence felt like a surprise. She made notes on the clipboard that were less notes and more evidence; proof that the map and the reality had found each other, that the thing she and Freddie had argued into existence over four committee meetings and six weeks of daily proximity was standing on actual cobblestones under actual bunting in actual October light.
She glanced down the street to where she'd last seen Freddie.
He was with Dylan. They were talking at the north end, away from the main activity, and from this distance she could read the body language without the words. Dylan, with his hands in his jacket pockets, which meant he was being serious. Freddie, with his stillness, which meant he was listening fully. She knew they were talking about her. Dylan was likely giving her new boyfriend The Talk.
Boyfriend?
Was Freddie her boyfriend? Did she want him to be?
"You're staring," Maggie said, appearing at her shoulder with two cups of mulled cider.
"I'm monitoring the north booth area."
"Mm." Maggie handed her a cup. "How are things going? With Freddie."
Wren accepted the cider. It was warm against her palms, the smell of it—cinnamon and clove and something citrusy—rising in the cold air. "Things are…" She stopped. "Good. Things are good."
"I'm so glad you're together," Maggie said. Simply, warmly, the way Maggie said things that she meant completely. "He's a good man. I knew it when he was at the ranch on Eli's birthday. He couldn't keep his eyes off you."
Wren blinked and blinked again.
"Some of the men—they're going through it, you know. They're carrying enormous things, and it changes how they move through the world. Freddie always moved through it carefully. He paid attention." She looked down the street. "He's been paying attention to you for weeks."
Wren followed her gaze. She remembered it then. Freddie had been at Eli's birthday. He'd been sitting next to Oliver, drinking a root beer. She remembered that because she thought it odd that the men were drinking from green beer bottles, and one had a brown bottle with a root beer label.
At the north end, Dylan clapped Freddie on the back—once, definitively. Freddie's expression shifted into something she could see even from this distance, something that was not his usual controlled surface but underneath it. She felt the warmth of it move through her like the cider.
She was going to dinner with him tonight. She was—whatever this was, she was in it, and the shape of it wasbecoming clearer, and the shape was the shape of something she had not allowed herself to want very specifically because wanting it specifically meant it could be lost specifically, and she was done with specific losses.
"Wren."
Oliver appeared from the direction of the craft booths with the mild, slightly purposeful expression of a man who had something to say and had decided this was the moment. His fair hair was little wind-ruffled, but he was looking well-rested in a way that suggested the farm emergencies had temporarily concluded.
"Oliver." She straightened. "Did you make it to bed?"
"Thursday night. Bliss." He smiled, then looked at her with the careful attention that she recognized from the examination room on Heathcliff's first visit, when he'd had to deliver the news that the cat was undernourished. "Can I have a quick word?"
Maggie evaporated with the grace of a woman who understood the social requirement and had excellent instincts about when to provide it. Her cider went with her.
Oliver walked her a few feet from the nearest booths, far enough for privacy. He put his hands in his jacket pockets and looked at her with an expression she couldn't quite read; not quite hesitant, not quite uncomfortable. Something in between.
"I got your letter," he said.
The world stilled. She hadn't thought about the letter she'd written to Oliver in days. She looked at Oliver's face and understood, in some part of herself that was already doing calculations she hadn't consciously authorized, that she was about to discover something. Oliver had not written those letters.
She thought about Freddie at the north end of the street. Freddie with his hands in his jacket pockets, and she wished he was here. She thought about the letters in the shoebox. Thespecific warmth of them, the feeling of being seen. And she realized that the warmth of the letters were not as warm as Freddie's kisses left her.
"Wren," Oliver said gently. "It wasn't me. The letters; I didn't write them."
He held her gaze with the directness of someone who thought directness was a kindness in difficult moments, and Wren had always agreed with this in principle and found it extremely hard in practice.
"I've been thinking about how to say this all night long. I didn't want to—I didn't want you to be embarrassed, but I also thought you deserved to know the truth straight away."
The mulled cider was still warm in her hands. But his words were not unwelcome. They sounded exactly right; right tone, right cadence, right conclusion. Oliver was not her secret admirer.
