She thought aboutI've been in love with you since the first time I saw you.
She slept eventually. Not well and not for long. The few hours between two and six had been genuine sleep rather than the restless horizontal wakefulness of the earlier part of the night. She woke to gray October light coming through the window above the shop and Heathcliff sitting on the end of the bed looking at her with the expression of a cat who had opinions about her life decisions.
The shop was quiet around her; the inhabited kind, the sound of a space that knew her. The letters were spread across every surface, and she had read them all twice now. She sat with the accumulated weight of them, which was considerable.
She looked at the chalk menu board through the open door to the front of the shop. She had looked at it hundreds of times. She had looked at it this morning and not seen it, and now she was looking at it and seeing it entirely. It had been block letters, but there—the L of love had a bit of a loop. A familiar loop that was in each of the letters.
Wait? Love? Wait, coffee drink had love in the title?
This morning the board didn't list prices or the day's special. This morning it said I'm in love with Wren Banksand itwas signedFreddie Gallagher. It was front and center on the sidewalk for all to see.
The lettering was precise, slightly compact, with a controlled slant to the right. The capitals clean and deliberate. The lowercase letters with their particular even spacing, each one the same measured distance from the next.
She looked at the seventh letter on the table. She looked at the board. She looked at the letter. It was the same hand. She thought back to when the wordlattehad been on the board. She remembered it had the same loop, unlike the rest of the block letters.
It had always been the same hand; the chalk on the board and the ink on the cream paper, the same slight slant, the same measured spacing, the same quality of a person who wrote the way they did everything: carefully, with full attention, without wasted motion. She had looked at the chalkboard every day for eight weeks. She had looked at the letters every day for eight weeks. She had not?—
She laughed. A small sound, involuntary, the laugh of a woman who had just discovered the dimension of her own blind spot and found it both mortifying and somehow clarifying. She had been a detective for eight weeks with a significant clue right outside her own shop, visible from the reading chair she sat in every single morning, and looked right through it because she had been looking for what she expected to find.
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.
The letters. The board. The flat white ready before she'd ordered. The glass on the pavement.
She took her hands from her eyes and looked at letter eleven.
This is the last letter I'll write to you. Tonight, you'll hear my words.
He'd been planning to tell her. He'd worked up the courage to do it. She wondered why? Had Oliver told him that Wrensuspected him? Had Dylan set him straight the other day in town?
She was reading it now as evidence of Freddie Gallagher at his kitchen table at some late hour, a notebook open, writing the truest thing he knew how to write in the way he knew how to write it. Putting it on paper because his voice wouldn't carry it to her.
She thought about him on the wet corner the other night. The words forming and dissolving. The effort visible, the most effort she had seen on his face, the controlled surface doing its inadequate work while something under it pushed at the walls.
He had been afraid.
Wren knew what afraid felt like. She had been afraid for months; afraid of being a disappointment to her admirer, afraid of herself being too much, afraid of wanting something too much to lose it. Fear was a reasonable response to the evidence of her own romantic history.
Freddie was frightened, and he had not stopped. He had written ten letters, and he had moved the cart to the street outside her window, and he had shown up every day, and had slipped a signed confession through her brass slot and sat in a restaurant waiting for her.
He had tried. Badly, in some ways. Not perfectly. But persistently, daily, with both arms.
She looked at the chalk menu board. At the handwriting that had always been his handwriting. Then at the man who waited patiently on his side of the street.
Freddie was waiting for permission. He wasn't the kind of man to barge in. He wasn't the kind of man to ignore her feelings and put his own first.
Wren unlocked the shop door and pushed it open.
