She stepped back further.
His hands dropped.
"You left the letter tonight," she said slowly. "At the shop. You signed it."
"Yes."
"With your name."
"Yes."
"Freddie."
"Wren—"
"After." She stopped. Her voice had gone very quiet. Not cold, not furious, something more fundamental than either. The voice of a woman whose accounting had just encountered a figure that didn't match. "After the committee meetings. After the rain. After…" She looked at him. "After you came inside the bookshop."
Freddie held her gaze. He did not look away. He was not, he had decided some time ago, going to hide from this part.
"Yes," he said.
The restaurant moved around them. Someone laughed at the table near the bar. A waiter crossed the room with two plates of something that smelled like the braised thing and the rosemary thing, and the ordinary evening continued its ordinary work while Wren looked at him with an expression he had not seen before and which he understood he had produced.
She had come here to choose him. He could see it in her face, could see the trace of it still, the warmth she'd walked in with. She had crossed the room and walked into his arms and saidI think I'm in love with youand she had meant it. Every word of it. And she had meant it for a man she thought she knew.
"You kissed me," she said. The inventory quality of the voice was not accusatory, just precise, the way she was precise aboutthings that mattered. "You held me in my own shop. And all this time you had…you were…"
"Yes," he said for the third time, because it was the only word available that was true. "All of it was me. The man in the shop and the man who wrote the letters are the same man. I should have told you earlier. I should have told you from the beginning." He paused. "I was afraid of what you'd do with it."
She looked at him.
He looked back.
The candlelight between them flickered in a draft from the kitchen. It was a small movement. It settled again into stillness.
Wren took another step back. Not angry. Not—he searched her face and found something he understood: the expression of a woman who needed to think without an audience, who was going to process this somewhere private, who was not going to do the reckoning here, in a restaurant, with rosemary in the air and his hands empty where they'd been full thirty seconds ago.
"I need…" Her hand was at her coat, the button she hadn't done up. She did it up now, carefully, buying herself a moment. "I need to go."
She looked at him for a long moment. Freddie let her look. He had nothing to hide behind tonight. The letter was signed. He was here, name attached, no paper between them, and whatever she found when she looked, she was welcome to it.
Wren turned. She walked back through the restaurant, past the other diners who had no idea what had just happened in the candlelight, and pushed through the door into the cold.
Freddie stood at the table.
The waiter appeared at his elbow. "Ready to order?"
"No," Freddie said. "Thank you."
He sat back down. He looked at the stars and the moon through the window. He looked at his own hands on the table; the hands that had written ten love letters. The hands that hadlet the love of his life slip through his fingers and walk out the door. He wanted to chase after her. But there was nothing more he could say. Nothing more he could do. All that was left to do was to wait for the reckoning.
