Remy’s didn’t have a sign.
Fenrir told me this on the walk over, like it was a fact everyone simply knew, the way you’d mention which subway line ran express on weekends, and I spent the better part of two blocks deciding whether that was charming or deeply impractical before we actually arrived and I understood it was somehow both at once — a narrow black door between a dry cleaner and a shuttered flower shop, no name, no menu posted, just a small brass bell you rang and waited for someone to decide, apparently on vibes alone, whether you’d earned dinner that night.
“This feels like a test I haven’t studied for,” I said, as Fenrir rang the bell with the easy confidence of a man who’d clearly passed it before.
“You’ll be fine. Theo likes me. By extension, that means he’ll tolerate you for at least one meal, possibly longer if you don’t say anything insulting about his bread.”
“I would never insult anyone’s bread. My mother would disown me.”
The door opened before he could respond, revealing a short, intense-looking man in a chef’s apron who looked Fenrir up and down with the specific scrutiny of someone deciding whether tonight’s guest list had improved or worsened.
“You brought the blogger,” Theo said, by way of greeting, already turning to lead us inside without waiting for confirmation.
“Good. I read the speech. Made my sous chef cry into the bisque, which she insists didn’t affect the bisque, and I insist absolutely did.”
“It’s an honor to ruin your bisque,” I said, and Theo’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile but clearly wanted to be one, before he disappeared toward the kitchen, leaving us at a small table tucked into the corner of a room that held maybe eight tables total, candlelight, low conversation, the specific hush of a place that had never once needed to advertise.
“So,” Fenrir said, once wine had been poured by a waiter who introduced himself only as “whoever’s free,” “what happens now? With Red, I mean. Now that the whole world knows where to find him.”
It was the question I’d been turning over myself since the morning after the gala, and I still didn’t have a complete answer, only the beginning shape of one.
“I think I’m done being anonymous,” I said slowly.
“Not done writing. Just done hiding behind it. I talked to Iris, actually — she wants to publish the anthology under my real name now, which feels strange and right at the same time, like finally getting to put my own name on something I built entirely alone.”
“That’s good. That’s really good, Clancy.” He paused, something more careful crossing his face.
“Does that mean you’re staying at Fairy Tales Inc.? I’ll admit I have a vested interest in the answer, and not just a professional one.”
“Iris offered me a new role, actually. Something between editorial and digital strategy — acquiring and developing exactly the kind of voice-driven, slightly unhinged internet writing that apparently built half our audience without anyone in leadership noticing for years. She called it ‘formalizing what you were already doing accidentally,’ which felt like a fairly accurate description of my entire career.”
“Are you taking it?”
“I think so. On the condition that I never have to report directly to my own boyfriend, which Iris found hilarious and immediately agreed to, mostly because she said, and I’m quoting her exactly, ‘the optics of that arrangement would be a nightmare even by this company’s standards.'”
“She’s not wrong. Although for the record, I’d have recused myself from every single performance review on principle.”
“You say that now. I’ve seen you in a board meeting. You’d have found a way to make my annual review weirdly romantic and everyone would have had to sit through it.”
“That’s a very specific accusation.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
“It’s an accurate one.” I stole a bite off his plate, an old habit I’d apparently picked up from watching Beck do it to me for four years, and he let me, laughing, swatting half-heartedly at my fork.
“There’s more, though.” I turned my wineglass a slow half circle, working up to it.
“I think I want to actually write something new. Not the blog — or not just the blog. A book. About this. Not the company secrets, not anything that isn’t mine to tell, but — the wolf thing. The treehouse. What it actually costs to spend eleven years assuming the worst about someone you loved, and what it felt like to find out you’d been wrong the whole time.”
“You want to write about us.”
“I want to write about hope, mostly. About how it sneaks back in even when you’ve spent a decade building very efficient walls against it.” I looked up at him, candlelight doing something soft and unfair to the whole shape of his face, same as it always seemed to.
“I’d want your blessing first. It’s your story too, as much as mine.”
He reached across the table and took my hand, slow, certain.
“Write it. All of it, even the parts that make me look like a coward for eleven years, because that part’s true too, and I’d rather see it told honestly than protected on my behalf. I think I’ve had enough of being protected from my own worst moments. I’d rather just survive having told them properly.”
Theo brought the food himself, which Fenrir informed me, in a low aside, was a genuine honor reserved for maybe one table a night.
He set down the first course — something involving scallops and a sauce I had no vocabulary sophisticated enough to describe — with the brisk, proprietary air of a man personally offended by the idea of anyone enjoying his food without his direct supervision.
“Eat slowly,” Theo instructed, already halfway back toward the kitchen.
“I will know if you don’t. I always know.”
“Is that a threat?” I asked Fenrir, once he’d gone.
“With Theo, it’s rarely just one thing.” Fenrir picked up his fork, smiling faintly.
“He’s been feeding this family longer than Norwood’s been running the house, if you can believe that. He catered my mother’s funeral, actually, completely free, refused payment, said it wasn’t a job that should ever have a price attached to it. I think that’s mostly why I still come here. The food’s extraordinary, but that’s not really the reason.”
The meal that followed was the kind that made conversation slow down naturally, the two of us trading smaller, easier subjects between courses — Sprocket’s latest diagnostic disaster, Lark’s ongoing battle with the jeweler, whether Norwood had ever, in eleven years, actually taken a single day off.
“He took three days once,” Fenrir said, considering it seriously.
“When I was sixteen. I asked where he’d gone and he said, and I quote, ‘somewhere a butler is allowed to also be a person, briefly,’ and never elaborated further. I’ve never pushed. I think some mysteries deserve to stay mysteries.”
“That’s the most Norwood sentence I’ve ever heard secondhand.”
“He’d be thrilled you said that. He won’t admit it, but he’d be thrilled.”
Somewhere around dessert — something involving chocolate and a citrus I couldn’t quite place, the kind of dish that made you slow down out of pure respect — Fenrir got quiet in a way that felt different from the easy quiet we’d been sharing all night, more deliberate, like he was building toward something.
“I want to ask you something,” he said, “and I want you to know there’s no wrong answer, and I’m not trying to rush anything that doesn’t need rushing.” Follow the newest chapters on novelping.com.
“Okay.”
“Would you consider moving in? Not right away, necessarily. Just — at some point, sooner rather than later, if it’s something you’re open to. I’ve spent eleven years rattling around that house by myself, and I think I’ve finally figured out what was actually missing from it the whole time, and I’d rather not wait another decade to fix it.”
I thought about the house — the rose garden, the treehouse now strung with party lights nobody had taken down, the study with its real fireplace, Norwood’s dry, knowing warmth woven through every room of it — and felt something settle in my chest, certain and unhurried, the specific feeling of being asked to walk into a life instead of just visit it.
“Yes,” I said.
“Not tonight. But yes. I think I’ve been ready for that answer longer than I let myself admit, too.”
“What does Norwood think? Have you asked him, or am I about to find out secondhand the way I find out most things in that house?”
“I haven’t told him yet. Knowing Norwood, he’ll act like he already knew before either of us did, and he’ll probably be right.” Fenrir laughed, easy and unguarded, the particular sound that had become, over the past month, my favorite thing in the entire world to be responsible for.
“He did mention, the morning after the time capsule, that he’d been waiting eleven years for someone to make that house loud again. I think he meant it as a hint.”
“Norwood doesn’t hint. Norwood states things very quietly and lets you catch up eventually.”
“That tracks completely.”
We walked home slowly afterward, the city quiet around us in the particular way it got close to midnight, and somewhere around the halfway point, Fenrir laughed suddenly, apropos of nothing.
“What?”
“I just keep thinking about how this started,” he said.
“I assigned my own employee to track down an anonymous blogger, who turned out to be the same employee, who turned out to be the kid I lost track of when I was twelve. If I’d written this as fiction for one of our own catalogs, Iris would have rejected it for being too neat.”
“Real life’s allowed to be neater than fiction sometimes. I think it earns it, occasionally, after making you suffer enough first.”
“Is that what this was? Earning it?”
“I think it might have been,” I said, slipping my hand into his.
“For what it’s worth,” he added, after a while, “I think I’d have found my way back to you eventually, even without the blog, even without Iris’s deal, even without any of it. Some things just don’t stay lost forever, however hard they try.”
“That’s either very romantic or very ominous, depending on how I choose to read it.”
“Choose romantic. I’ve had quite enough ominous for one lifetime.” He squeezed my hand, and we walked the rest of the way in easy, comfortable silence, the city lights doing their slow, familiar work overhead, the whole impossible month finally settling into something that felt, for the first time, less like a story I was still bracing to lose, and more like one I’d actually get to keep.