Chapter 2: Terms and Conditions
The contract Jonah Park had drafted ran to eleven pages. By four o'clock on Sunday afternoon, Wren had struck through nine of them in red ink, and Jonah was looking at his own paragraphs the way a man looks at a car that has been towed.
"That was a perfectly good indemnity clause," he said.
"It indemnified you," Wren said. "I'm not the one with a legal department."
They were sitting at the long composing table in the middle of Castellano Press, under the hanging lamps, with the type cabinets behind them and Old Nell silent at the far end of the room. Callum sat across from her. Dahlia sat at the end of the table with her clipboard. Jonah had brought two printed copies, a box of pens, and a laptop he had not been allowed to open for an hour.
It had started at nine that morning, when Callum called her.
"It wasn't me," he had said, before she could speak. "The photo."
"I know. It was taken from behind the ambulance bay. Someone was waiting."
He had been quiet for a second. "Then we have a choice. We deny it, and every paper in the state says the governor's son is lying again. Or we do this, and we do it on your terms."
She had looked at the Tidewater letter, still on the counter where she had left it.
"Bring your lawyer," she had said. "Bring two copies. I'm not writing on a clean one."
* * *
Jonah's copy stayed clean. Callum's copy was the one she marked, page by page, in the red pen she used for proofs. Nobody objected. Callum pushed it across the table to her without being asked, and after that it was simply his copy, covered in her handwriting.
Clause 1 set the term: six months from the date of a legal marriage, with the ceremony to take place within fourteen days of signing.
"Fourteen days," Dahlia said, writing it down. "I've planned weddings in fourteen days. They were all for people running from something."
"We are running from something," Callum said. "Several things."
Clause 2 was Rule One. Neither party shall develop romantic feelings for the other. Jonah had written it as a joke, and he said so.
"Leave it in," Wren said. She uncapped the red pen and added a line in the margin, then read it aloud. "If either party breaches this rule, that party must disclose the breach to the other within twenty-four hours."
Jonah frowned. "That's not enforceable."
"It doesn't have to be enforceable. It has to be honest." She looked at Callum. "I don't trust you to be honest even about that. So now it's in writing."
Callum held her gaze. "Fine."
Clause 3 was Rule Two. Neither party shall lie to the other about any matter affecting the other's family, career, or reputation, nor share the terms of this agreement with anyone other than the persons listed below. The persons listed below were Jonah Park and Dahlia Okoro. Dahlia signed a separate confidentiality page with a flourish.
Clause 4: no payment, no property, no gifts of value. Castellano Press remained Wren's alone.
Clause 5 took the longest. Jonah wanted the Heritage Clause to say the Trust would consider funding an assessment. Wren crossed out consider. Jonah wrote in reasonable efforts. She crossed that out too.
"A proper assessment costs about ninety thousand dollars," Callum said. "Architectural historians, a structural survey, archive work. The Trust spends more than that on its Christmas gala."
"Then it can skip a gala," Wren said.
In the final version, Clause 5, the Heritage Clause, required the Beaumont Civic Trust to fund an independent heritage assessment of Ashgrove Row, conducted by a panel with no connection to Vance Meridian Development. Clause 6, the Voice Clause, said Callum could not speak for her on Ashgrove Row, and that she could keep campaigning, including against the governor.
"You're sure about that one?" Jonah asked Callum.
"She'd do it anyway," Callum said. "This way it's legal."
Clause 7 covered public conduct. Holding hands, linking arms, a kiss on the cheek. Callum took the pen from Wren's side of the table, the first time he had touched it, and added a sentence in his own small, slanted handwriting beneath the red. Any other kiss requires that one party ask, and the other agree, first.
Wren read it twice. She did not comment. She took the pen back.
Clause 8: shared residence at Callum's townhouse in Larkspur Heights, separate bedrooms, and Wren's right to return to the apartment above the press whenever her grandfather's health required it. Clause 9, the Grandfather Clause: Teodoro Castellano was never to know. Clause 10: no statements about the relationship without mutual approval, and no selling the story, during the marriage or after.
Somewhere around Clause 10, Dahlia and Jonah began to argue about a comma.
"It's a serial comma," Jonah said. "It prevents ambiguity."
"It's a speed bump," said Dahlia. "Nobody reads a wedding contract and thinks, where's my comma."
"Everyone who gets divorced thinks that."
Wren laughed before she could stop it. Across the table, Callum laughed at the same moment, a short, surprised sound. They both stopped. She looked down at the page. He looked at his watch.
Clause 11 was on the last page. The Truth Clause. At the conclusion of the term, Callum Beaumont shall make a public statement regarding the events of March 2016, in wording approved by Wren Castellano.
In the margin beside it, in red, Wren wrote: @HallMonitor. Every word.
Clause 12 set out the ending: an uncontested divorce, the stated reason being irreconcilable schedules. If either party broke Rule Two, the other could end the agreement early with seven days' written notice.
At 11:52 on Sunday night, they signed both copies. Jonah witnessed. Dahlia took a photograph of the signatures for her own records, which Jonah said was a breach of something and which she ignored.
Callum held out his hand. Wren shook it once, firmly, the way she shook hands with paper suppliers.
"Fourteen days," he said.
"Thirteen," she said. "It's almost midnight."
* * *
St. Brigid discharged Nonno Teo at noon on Monday. By two o'clock he was in his armchair in the apartment above the press, wearing his brown wool vest, with a checked handkerchief in the breast pocket and a new list of pills on the side table.
They had agreed on the wording that morning, by text. Callum's statement to the press had gone out at ten: Wren Castellano and I are engaged. We ask for privacy while her grandfather recovers. Wren had approved every word. It was the first sentence they had written together.
Now they stood in front of the armchair, and Wren said it out loud.
Nonno Teo looked from her to Callum and back. Then he took off his round glasses, wiped them with the handkerchief, and pressed the handkerchief to his eyes for a moment.
"I'll print the invitations," he said.
"You'll rest," Wren said. "I'll print them."
That evening she laid out paper samples on the composing table downstairs. She passed over the heavy cotton stock she had been saving for three years, the one she had always said she would use for something that mattered, and chose a plain white card instead. Nonno Teo, watching from the bottom of the stairs, said nothing at all.
* * *
Carrow House, the governor's residence, stood at the top of a long gravel drive in Halvergate, forty minutes from Port Aldine. On Tuesday night every window was lit.
The dining room seated twenty. Tonight it held six. Governor Harlan Beaumont sat at the head of the table in a charcoal suit, his salt-and-pepper hair swept back, a small silver gull pinned to his lapel. On his right sat his wife, Adaline, a former appellate judge, her ash-blond hair in a low knot and a silk scarf at her throat. Pippa, nineteen, sat beside Wren with her phone face down next to her plate, which Wren suspected was a personal record.
The governor was perfectly polite. He asked about the press, the typeface, her grandfather's recovery. He knew the name of Nonno Teo's cardiologist.
Over the fish course, he set down his fork.
"Eight thousand signatures, I hear," he said. "On your petition."
"Eight thousand and twelve," Wren said.
"Impressive, for a single block." He smiled. "Harborline Renewal will bring four thousand jobs to that waterfront. I hope you'll let me show you the plans."
"I've seen the plans. They have a parking garage where my press is."
Pippa coughed into her napkin. Adaline did not look up from her plate, but her mouth moved very slightly at one corner.
"Ms. Castellano," Adaline said, in the even voice of someone who had spent twenty years on a bench, "what exactly would the garage replace?"
"A press from 1922, a clockmaker, a bakery, and a bookshop," Wren said. "And about forty people who live upstairs."
Adaline nodded once and went back to her fish.
The door opened before the governor could answer. A man came in, apologizing: dark blond hair combed neatly back, thin gold-rimmed glasses, a pale blue suit, gold cufflinks shaped like the letter V.
"Forgive me, Governor. The budget call ran over." He came around the table and held out his hand to Wren. "Graham Vance. Deputy chief of staff. We were at Marrow Hill together, though I doubt you remember me."
"I remember," Wren said.
He shook Callum's hand next and clapped him on the shoulder. "Congratulations. Honestly. I always knew you two had unfinished business."
He took the empty seat beside Callum and was, within five minutes, the easiest person at the table. He asked Wren about Ashgrove Serif as if he wanted to know the answer: how long the italic had taken, whether she drew on paper or on screen, why the lowercase g had two loops. He told a story about the governor falling asleep at a ribbon cutting that made Pippa laugh out loud and made the governor almost smile.
Only once did Wren see Callum look at him directly. It was when Graham mentioned the lake house. Callum's hand went to his watch and turned it a quarter of the way around his wrist, and then he looked back at his plate.
By dessert Wren had decided that Graham Vance was the least difficult person in the room.
* * *
After coffee, the governor asked if she would like to see the library.
It was a long, cold room lined with law books nobody had opened in years. He closed the door behind them and did not sit.
"I'll be direct, Ms. Castellano, since you seem to prefer it." He took a folded sheet of paper from his inside pocket and laid it on the reading table. "An offer for Castellano Press. The business, the equipment, and your interest in the lease. Three times its appraised value. My office has already had it appraised."
She did not pick it up. She read the number from where she stood. It was more money than Castellano Press had earned in the last ten years combined. It would pay for Nonno Teo's care for the rest of his life, with enough left over to open a studio anywhere she liked.
"In exchange," he went on, "you withdraw the petition. And you exit my son's life gracefully. A broken engagement is a small story. A governor's daughter-in-law leading the opposition to his own jobs program is not."
He placed a black fountain pen on top of the paper, lined up neatly with its edge.
"Take the week," said Governor Beaumont.