Freddie stood on the pavement for a moment longer. He looked at the dark shop and then at the street around him. He took out the notebook. He had written notes, adjustments, and the record of a working event. He turned past all of that to the blank pages at the back. He found one. He pulled out a pen; the pen. Her pen.
He sat on the bookshop steps for a moment. He put the pen to the page and wrote.
No Dear Wren. No opening. Just:
It's Freddie.I have been writing to you since the sixteenth of September. The letters are all true. Every word is true. I put them through your slot before seven in the morning because I am a coward, and I have been a coward for ten letters. I am not going to be a coward about this one.
He paused.Read it back. Continued.
The problem isthat I have always been able to say what I mean on paper and not in person. Here I am again choosing paper because it’s safer, and I am sorry for that.
I would like to say it in person. I intend to say it in person. Tonight at dinner, I will tell you to your face. This is the last letter I'll write to you. Tonight, you'll hear my words.
— Freddie
No book references.No literary framework. No careful selection of the right precedent from the right author to give the feeling the shape of something already understood. Just his name, and what he meant.
He folded the letter. He got up from the step. The last of the day's light had gone, and the main street was lit by the fairy lights and the lamp-posts and the warm windows of the pub at the end, and Pages & Prose was dark.
He shoved the letter into the brass slot. He stood for a moment on the threshold. On the outside of the glass, where he had always been, where he had positioned himself deliberately for months and months. He thought about all the things she might add up.
He was walking into a situation where she might not forgive him. Where she might accuse him of lying by omission. He knew this.
He knew what he felt. That was, he realized, a new thing. Or not new, but clarified: he knew it completely, without the cushion of maybe or the managed distance of the letters.
Freddie Gallagher was in love with Wren Banks. Had been for longer than he'd admitted it to himself. Would be—he understood this, on the step of her darkened shop on an early evening in October, with ten letters behind him and the night ahead—for considerably longer than he currently had data for.
He turned and walked back down the main street. Tonight he would say it—all of it, in his own voice, without paper—and whatever happened after that would happen.
He had been afraid of this for months.
He was still afraid of it.
He was going to do it, anyway.
