CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Walking back through the town in the early evening, Wren felt a lightness in her heart. Oliver wasn't her secret admirer, and she wasn't upset about that. She was also no longer interested in finding him. If he couldn't be bothered to reveal himself, then she wanted nothing more to do with him. The next letter, if any more came, she wouldn't open. Instead, she was going to focus on what was right in front of her.
Or rather, who was right in front of her.
She was going to find Freddie. Not for dinner—not for the measured, normal occasion of dinner, with its appropriate timing and its room for second-guessing. She was going to find him now, and she was going to say the thing she should have said with less preamble and fewer investigative detours.
She was choosing him.
Not the admirer. Freddie. The man who walked on the street side and noticed glass and put himself between her and danger. She was choosing the person who had been present daily, imperfectly, entirely. She was choosing the one who had shown up.
The letters—whoever had written them, however it resolved—were a separate question for a separate moment. She couldhold that question without letting it hold her. Right now she wanted Freddie to know that there was something between them, and she wanted to know if he felt the same way too.
She thought he felt the same. His kisses surely told her that. And she hadn't seen him kissing any other women.
She was nearly at the shop. The lamp-post outside Pages & Prose cast its usual circle of light onto the stoop, warm and amber, and she was already reaching for her keys, already composing the route she'd take back through the streets to find him, when she saw the figure on the step.
Tall. Dark coat. One hand in his pocket and the other holding something cream.
Wren stopped dead in her tracks.
Preston turned at the sound of the gravel crunching under her last footfall.
Her body understood before her mind did. It was the bracing quality of a person encountering something their nervous system had already catalogued asnot this again.
He looked well. He always looked well; it was one of the things about Preston, the careful maintenance of presentation, everything in its right place. His expression was the one he wore when he believed he was being reasonable.
"Wren." He said her name the way he always had, with the confidence of a man who expected it to land well. "I've been waiting."
She looked at the cream thing in his hand. An envelope. A cream envelope. Her eyes went to the mail slot in the door—brass, original fixture, used exclusively by?—
"I found it," Preston said, following her gaze. "It was sticking halfway out when I got here." He held it out toward her.
She looked at the envelope. Then back at Preston, and felt a wave of relief. For a horrifying second, she had thought it might be him. That Preston might be her secret admirer. That shecould have fallen in love with a man who had lied, deceived, and hurt her so completely.
The handwriting on the front was just her name. One word, in the small, precise slant she had been looking at all afternoon. Wren. Not Dear Wren. Just her name, as though it was sufficient, as though it was the whole address.
She took it from him. She held it in both hands.
"I know I should have called," Preston said. He had moved into the mode she recognized; the one where he was delivering a considered speech, the words slightly too arranged, the emotions visible but managed. "I've been trying to reach you. I know you're angry?—"
"I'm not angry," she said.
This was true. She was not angry. She was standing outside her shop holding a letter with her name on it in handwriting she knew and looking at the man she'd spent two years with and feeling something that was not anger and not grief and was, she realized, mostly just the absence of anything in particular.
"—and I understand that, but I want you to know I've been doing a lot of thinking. About us. About what went wrong." Preston's voice had the quality of sincerity, which she had once found reassuring and now simply noted as a feature. "I made a mistake. A serious one. But I think if you're honest with yourself?—"
"Preston."
"—you know that what we had was real, and that one mistake?—"
"Preston." She said it again, not loudly. He stopped.
She looked at him. She looked at the careful coat and the carefully arranged expression and the man who had stood at her parents' table and told her she over-committed to things as he tasked her with more, who had saidyou're alot with the tone of someone diagnosing a problem and then asking herto do more, who had looked at her warmth and her opinions and her particular way of existing in the world and found them inconvenient.
She thought about Freddie saying not much at all, but anticipating her needs.
She thought about being inside both arms in the amber lamplight.
