CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Freddie was going to tell her tonight.
This was decided. He had told Dylan, and the words had come. Tonight at dinner they would come again, and this time they would be addressed correctly.
He had been rehearsing the shape of it—not a script. He'd learned from the notebook that scripts were the wrong approach. What was needed was not a prepared monologue, but a willingness to begin and trust that the rest would follow. The beginning was the hard part. Once he began, he thought he could continue.
He was moving past the back of the craft stalls when Oliver fell into step beside him.
"The letters," Oliver said.
Freddie kept walking.
"It's you, isn't it." It was not a question. It was said in the tone of a man stating something he had already concluded and was simply opening the floor for confirmation.
Around them the town moved —voices, footsteps, the smell of mulled cider and woodsmoke. A child ran past them with a Gameboy chirping electronic music.
"Yes," Freddie said.
Oliver nodded. He did not look surprised. He looked, if anything, like a man whose accounts had balanced. "How long?"
"Since September."
"She thought it was me. She wrote me a letter."
Oliver reached into his jacket pocket and produced an envelope, sealed and then opened. Oliver's name was on the front in Wren's handwriting. Freddie had seen her looping, forward-leaning script of someone whose thoughts moved fast.
"It was on a pile of mail at my office. I've just told her it wasn't me."
Oliver held it out.
Freddie looked at the envelope. He looked at Oliver.
"Read it," Oliver said. "You should read it."
Freddie took it.
The card inside was one page, front and back, in the same looping script. He read it standing in the middle of the street. The reading took less than two minutes and felt much longer.
Wren had written about the letters. About what they had meant. Not the mystery of who wrote them, but the content, the specific quality of attention in them, the feeling of being seen in the small things. Freddie's gaze snagged on one part in particular:I think I might be in love with him. If it's you, you know where to find me.
The words were perfect. They were exactly what he had hoped, in the abstract that she might feel—exactly what he had hoped in the careful, distanced way of a man who had been hoping things from behind glass for months and not allowed himself to fully believe in.
But they were written to Oliver.
Freddie folded the letter. He put it back in the envelope. He held it for a moment, looking at his own hands; the hands that had written letters in black ink on cream paper and slipped them through a brass slot in the dark.
"I should have told her," he said.
"Yes," Oliver said. Without judgment, without elaboration.
"I'm going to. Tonight."
"She doesn't know it's you. She's just found out it isn't me." Oliver held Freddie's gaze with the directness of a man who was not going to soften this. "Do it now. Go and talk to her."
Freddie walked to Pages & Prose. The bookshop was dark. He stopped on the pavement outside and looked at the window. Heathcliff lay in the window. The front display was visible with its fall poetry collection. Yet, the shop was dark in a way it shouldn't have been, two hours before closing. The sign had been turned. The lights were off. Through the glass, he could see the amber nightlight near the register.
Was she still at the market? Had she gone with her brother and sister-in-law?
