Chapter 1: The Worst Proposal in Port Aldine
At eleven o'clock on a Friday night, in room 412 of St. Brigid Hospital, Teodoro Castellano pulled the oxygen line away from his nose and said the thing he had clearly been saving.
"Before I go, I want to walk you down an aisle, cara."
Wren set her paper cup of vending-machine coffee on the windowsill. "You're not going anywhere. Dr. Hollis said the fluid is already down."
"Dr. Hollis is thirty-four." He tapped the back of her hand, where a smear of navy ink had survived three washings. "One aisle. That's all."
She was about to remind him that an aisle required a groom, and that she did not have one, when someone knocked on the open door.
The man in the doorway held a bunch of white daisies wrapped in brown paper. He had to dip his head under the curtain rail. Through his left eyebrow ran a small crescent-shaped scar she had last seen ten years ago, across a school hallway.
"Sorry to interrupt," said Callum Beaumont. "Can we talk? It's about marriage."
Nonno Teo's eyebrows rose above his round tortoiseshell glasses.
Wren stood. "Hallway," she said. "Now."
The corridor smelled of floor polish and reheated soup. Wren waited until a nurse's cart had squeaked around the corner.
"You have thirty seconds."
He did not waste them. "Six months. A legal marriage. Real license, real ceremony, separate lives behind closed doors. You get something you need, I get something I need. At the end, a quiet divorce. Nobody gets hurt."
"Nobody gets hurt," she repeated. "That's your pitch."
He took a business card from his coat and held it out. Callum R. Beaumont, Director, Harbor Legal Aid. A Program of the Beaumont Civic Trust. The name was set in a thin grotesque, and the gap between the capital T and the r in Trust was wide enough to park a truck in.
She took the card, turned it over once, and pressed it flat against the front of his coat.
"Your kerning is off," she said. "So is your conscience."
She went back into room 412 and shut the door. Through the narrow window she watched him stand in the corridor for a count of five. Then he left the daisies at the nurses' station and walked away.
"Who was that?" Nonno Teo asked.
"Nobody from anywhere good."
* * *
She did not sleep in the reclining chair. She sat with her sketchbook closed on her knees and thought about March of 2016.
An account called @HallMonitor had posted fourteen pages from her sketchbook, one every hour through a school day at Marrow Hill Academy. Letterform studies. On the ninth page, a letter to her mother that she had written and never mailed. By lunchtime, strangers could recite its first line.
The school traced the posts to Callum Beaumont's student login. He did not deny it. He served a three-day suspension, and by June he had transferred to a boarding school two states away. After that, nothing.
At two in the morning she went down to the waiting room for another coffee. The muted television was running late-night news. GOVERNOR'S SON IN GALA ALTERCATION. A grainy phone video filled the screen: a black-tie ballroom, Callum's hand flat on a heavyset man's chest, the man stumbling backward into a table of champagne flutes. The clip lasted eleven seconds. It had 4.2 million views.
Wren watched it twice.
Right, she thought. That's who he is.
* * *
By seven on Saturday morning she was unlocking Castellano Press.
Ashgrove Row was still under harbor fog, a single block of nineteenth-century red brick running down to the old ferry pier. The Portuguese bakery next door had its lights on. Above her own door, in gold leaf that Nonno Teo retouched every spring, the sign read CASTELLANO PRESS, EST. 1922.
Inside, the air smelled of ink and cotton paper. Old Nell, the black Heidelberg Windmill, stood in the center of the floor with her two gripper arms folded like a sleeping bird. Along the back wall ran the type cabinets, sixty narrow drawers of lead letters sorted by face and size. On the Vandercook proof press in the corner sat the job that was going to change everything: the first full specimen sheet of Ashgrove Serif, the typeface she had spent three years drawing. An independent publisher had licensed it for a new line of books. The final proofs were due in three weeks.
She pulled one proof, checked the lowercase g with a loupe, and picked up the mail.
The envelope from the building's management company was thin. The letter inside was two paragraphs long. Her lease, which expired on June 30, would not be renewed. The owner had received an offer to purchase the property and was, the letter said, giving it serious consideration.
Clipped behind it was a copy of the offer itself. It came from a company called Tidewater Holdings LLC, which proposed to buy the building along with all existing leasehold interests on Ashgrove Row. The paper was a heavy cream stock with a thin blue border. Good paper, she noted automatically. Expensive. The signature belonged to a managing agent. No person's name appeared anywhere.
She searched online. Tidewater Holdings had been registered eleven months earlier, with no website, no phone number, and an address at a law office in Halvergate, the state capital.
On the counter beside the laptop sat a clipboard with the paper copy of the petition. The online version of Save Ashgrove Row showed 8,012 signatures. It had not moved the city council an inch on the Harborline Renewal plan. The state historic preservation office had told her, politely, that a heritage review required a sponsor with funding and legal standing. She had neither. What she had was a street full of neighbors and an expiration date.
* * *
Dahlia Okoro arrived at nine-thirty carrying custard tarts from the bakery and the clipboard she took everywhere. Her box braids were tied up in a yellow scarf, her red cat-eye glasses pushed up on her head.
"How's Nonno?"
"Better. Fluid's down." Wren handed her the letter.
Dahlia read both pages and sat down on the stool by the type cabinets.
"There's more," Wren said, and told her about room 412, the daisies, and the six months.
Dahlia took off her glasses and cleaned them on her scarf, which meant Wren would not like what came next.
"What if you used him?"
"No."
"Hear me out. The Beaumont Trust funds things. You just told me the state wants a sponsor with money and standing." Dahlia tapped the letter. "And he needed something badly enough to show up at a cardiology ward at eleven on a Friday night. That's not romance, Wren. That's leverage."
"He ruined my junior year."
"I know. I'm not saying forgive him. I'm saying read the offer before you throw it at his coat."
Wren looked at the cream letter for a long time.
* * *
Harbor Legal Aid occupied a former hardware store on Dock Street, six blocks from Ashgrove Row. At one o'clock on a Saturday, nine people sat on folding chairs in the front room holding folders and envelopes.
Wren had come to refuse him properly, in daylight, with witnesses.
The receptionist pointed her toward the back. The door of the last office stood open, and she stopped in it.
Callum was sitting on the floor. His jacket hung on the back of the chair and his sleeves were rolled to the elbow. Four neat piles of paper lay on the carpet. In the only armchair sat an elderly woman in a green coat, holding her handbag in both hands.
"This pile is your rent receipts," he was saying. "Keep every one. This pile is from your landlord. And this one here," he held up a single page, "this is the one that matters. Look at the date. They gave you fourteen days. The law says thirty. That's our first argument, and it's a good one."
There was no camera in the room. He slid the pages into a blue folder and helped the woman to her feet.
When she had gone, he looked up and saw Wren. He stood and brushed off his knees.
She sat down in the armchair without being asked.
"I'm not here to say yes."
"Okay."
"I'm here to tell you what yes would cost." She held up one finger. "No money. Not a dollar, not a dress, not a ring I didn't pay for. If I do this, nobody gets to say I was bought."
"Fine."
A second finger. She put the Tidewater letter on his desk. "Your family's trust pays for an independent heritage assessment of Ashgrove Row. Done by people with no connection to Vance Meridian, and none to your father's office."
He read it twice and said he did not recognize the company. She believed that part.
"Fine," he said again.
A third finger. "When the six months are over, you stand in front of a microphone and tell everyone what happened in 2016. @HallMonitor. All of it. In words I approve."
"Yes."
He said it at once, with no pause at all.
Wren studied him. "You didn't even pretend to think about it."
"I've had ten years to think about it."
She did not know what to do with that answer, so she stood. "Put it in writing. I'll read it with a red pen."
"This isn't a yes," he said.
"No," she agreed, and left.
* * *
Callum watched her cross Dock Street through the office window, a pencil stuck through the knot of her dark brown hair, a silver ring shaped like an ampersand on her right hand. She did not look back.
He turned his grandfather's old watch on his wrist, then picked up the email he had printed on Thursday and read it again.
It had come from his father's chief of staff, which meant it had come from his father. Your situation is now a liability to the campaign and to the Trust. The board meets on April 1. If the Senate announcement in August is overshadowed by another photograph of you, Harbor Legal Aid's funding will not survive the review. Settle down. Be seen with someone decent. Stop giving them pictures.
Two hundred and twelve open cases sat in the cabinets behind him. The woman in the green coat was one of them.
At the florist on Friday he had reached for lilies and then remembered, without meaning to, that Wren Castellano hated lilies. He had chosen daisies. He had not let himself think about why he still knew that.
It had to be her, he thought, and put the email face down on the desk.
* * *
At 12:03 on Sunday morning, Wren's phone buzzed on the arm of the hospital recliner. Dahlia had sent a link and nothing else.
It opened to The Glass Column. The headline ran across the top in bold capitals: THE PRODIGAL HEIR'S SECRET GIRLFRIEND?
Below it was a photograph of the St. Brigid parking lot, taken on Friday night. She had gone down at eleven-forty to get her phone charger from the car. Callum had been standing beside a black sedan. He had said her name once, and she had kept walking. In the photograph, shot from low and far away, it looked as if she were walking toward him.
She enlarged the image. It had been taken with a long lens from across the lot, from behind the ambulance bay.
Nobody drove to a cardiology ward at eleven at night with a long lens by accident.
She had told no one but Dahlia. The photographer had been in position on Friday night, before Callum ever knocked on the door of room 412.
Someone had known he would be there.
Someone had known she would be, too.