CHAPTER THREE
Bea arrived with pastries from the bakery two doors down, a tote bag that appeared to contain approximately one of everything she owned, and the expression she wore when she already knew something interesting had happened and was waiting to be told.
"You have a face," she said, by way of greeting.
"I have my usual face," Wren said.
"It's different from your usual face." Bea shrugged off her coat and hung it on the hook behind the door. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"Wren."
"It's not — nothing happened in the way of events. Something happened in the way of—" Wren looked at the counter. Looked at Bea, who had arranged her face into the expression of a woman with infinite patience and absolutely no intention of going anywhere. "There's something I haven't told you."
The letters came out of the cedar box in chronological order, which was how Wren had stored them, because even in her more chaotic moments she was constitutionally incapable ofmismanaging a filing system. She laid them on the counter in a row while Bea stood on the other side.
"The first one arrived with the Neruda collection that was delivered six weeks ago, and I thought it was a mistake — like someone had dropped it with a delivery. Then the second one arrived a week later, and I thought?—"
"Wren." Bea picked up the first letter with both hands. "Stop talking."
The fairy lights along the poetry shelf did their amber work. Heathcliff, from his position on the window seat, watched the street with the concentration of a professional. Outside, a woman pushed a stroller past the teal-green frontage, and somewhere in the direction of the bakery a delivery van reversed with its intermittent beep. None of it touched the bubble that had formed around the counter where Bea was reading. She moved through the letters with the focused intensity of a woman sight-reading a score, occasionally going back, occasionally holding one slightly closer to the lamp.
"You have a secret admirer."
Wren watched her and tried not to vibrate. "It looks that way."
Bea nodded her head as she continued to read Letter Five.
"You don't seem surprised. Do things like this happen often in Valor?"
Bea lifted one brow. "This certainly isn't the first time. The men of Valor can be expressive when they find the woman they want to marry."
"Marry? Who said anything about marriage?"
"This one," Bea said, setting the fourth letter down with slightly more care than the others. She didn't elaborate.
In the fourth letter, her Secret Admirer had mentioned the Bride of Frankenstein.
Everyone remembers Cyrano's nose.The tragedy wasn't the face, but the distance he chose to keep behind it. Christian got the girl because he was willing to stand in the light. Cyrano wrote the letters and stayed in the dark.
I've been thinking about the Bride of Frankenstein, too. You recommended that to the middle school English teacher, remember? Frankenstein's Bride gets one scene, one choice, and it's rejection. But I think it was the first honest moment in the whole story. She looked at what she'd been handed and said: Not this. I don't think it's because he was a monster. I think it's because she knew her own mind — newly awakened though she was.
I wonder sometimes if you know yours as well as she did. I suspect you do. I suspect you would also refuse the obvious answer if it wasn't the right one.
Bea lookedat Wren over the letters with an expression that Wren could not immediately categorize. "This man lurked around your shop, listened to you recommend a book to strangers, and then he went home and wrote you pages about what that says about the kind of person you are."
"I know." Wren picked up her tea, which had gone cold again, and held it anyway. " That's why I haven't told anyone. If I said it out loud, it would become a thing that exists in the world, and then I'd have to…" She made a gesture that was meant to communicate the full weight of emotional exposure and its attendant risks. "I'd have to reckon with it."
"And now you're reckoning with it."
Wren sipped her tea, only to find that the cup was empty. The teabag sloshed against her upper lip.
"Oliver Hartley."
Wren blinked. "What?"
"Oliver Hartley." Bea said it with the calm of settled certainty. "It's him."
