Chapter 3: Fourteen Days of Pretending
Wren did not need the week. She needed four minutes and the password to the Beaumont Civic Trust's Instagram account, which Callum handed over at eight on Wednesday morning with the expression of a man giving away the keys to an armory.
"You're sure," he said.
"Clause 6. You wrote it into a legal document. I'm just reading it back to you."
She stood at the counter of the press and typed. She posted a photograph of the petition clipboard beside Old Nell, and under it she wrote: Save Ashgrove Row now has 8,412 signatures. Thank you to everyone who signed this week. The Beaumont Civic Trust will fund an independent heritage assessment of the block. More soon.
She showed it to him before she pressed the button. He read it, nodded, and she posted it.
His phone rang eleven minutes later. He looked at the screen and walked into the back room. Through the half-open door she heard him say, "Yes, sir," and then, "No, sir," and then, after a long silence, "It's in the agreement. You taught me to read agreements."
He did not say he was sorry. When he came back out, his watch had been turned all the way around his wrist.
The governor's paper stayed folded on the counter until Friday, when Wren used it to level the leg of a drying rack.
* * *
She moved into the townhouse in Larkspur Heights on Wednesday afternoon, with two suitcases, a box of books, a potted pothos, and one wooden type case she had rescued from the scrap pile ten years earlier.
The house was tall and narrow, with white walls, pale floors, and almost nothing in it. There were four chairs, one sofa, and a coffee machine with more buttons than Old Nell.
"You've lived here how long?" she asked.
"Three years."
"Where's your stuff?"
He looked around the living room as if seeing it for the first time. "This is my stuff."
By Wednesday night the pothos was on the kitchen windowsill. On Thursday morning Wren drilled two holes in the living room wall and hung the type case, its thirty-two small compartments empty, like a map of a city with no people in it. Callum came downstairs, saw it, opened his mouth, and closed it again.
"It needs something in it," he said eventually.
"It will."
They fought about the coffee machine for most of Thursday morning. Wren wanted to know why a coffee machine required a phone app. Callum wanted to know why anyone would add cinnamon to black coffee. Neither of them won. By Friday there was a jar of ground cinnamon next to the machine, and neither of them mentioned who had bought it.
The rooms were at opposite ends of the upstairs hall. Callum's door stayed closed. So did hers.
On Thursday night they ate takeout noodles at the kitchen island, on opposite sides, and drew up what Callum called the public script: who had proposed (he had), where (the pier at the end of Ashgrove Row), and when they had reconnected (a legal aid fundraiser in January, which he had actually attended and she had actually printed the programs for).
"People will ask why," Wren said. "After high school."
"Then we say we grew up." He pushed a printout across the island. "Different subject. Tidewater Holdings. The registered address is a law office in Halvergate that registers about four hundred companies a year. They won't say who their client is, and legally they don't have to."
"So it's a dead end."
"It's a locked door," he said. "Locked doors have keys."
She folded the printout and put it in her apron pocket.
The marked copy of the contract lived in a locked leather briefcase that Callum carried everywhere. Jonah kept the clean original in the safe at his office. "Reporters go through recycling bins," Callum had said, when Wren raised an eyebrow at the briefcase. "I've learned that the hard way."
* * *
The engagement photographs were Pippa's idea, and on Thursday afternoon Pippa ran them like a film director.
"Walk toward me. No, slower. Wren, stop looking at him like he owes you money."
"He does owe me money. He broke my pencil sharpener."
"That was an accident," Callum said.
"Hold hands," said Pippa.
They were standing in the middle of Ashgrove Row, in front of the bakery, with the fog just lifting off the harbor behind them. Callum held out his hand. Wren took it. His palm was warm and dry, and he held her hand the way a person holds something they have been told is fragile, carefully and not quite tightly.
Pippa took forty photographs. When she lowered the camera and began scrolling through them, neither of them let go. They stood there for another ten seconds, watching Pippa scroll. Then Wren noticed and dropped his hand, and Callum put his in his coat pocket, and nobody said anything.
Pippa, who had noticed everything, said nothing either. She posted one photograph that night: the two of them from behind, walking toward the pier, the gold leaf of the Castellano Press sign just visible over their shoulders. She captioned it with the name of the street and nothing else. By morning it had two hundred thousand likes, and the online petition had gained four hundred new signatures from people who had looked up where Ashgrove Row was.
* * *
On Friday the reporters found the press.
There were six of them on the sidewalk when Wren and Callum arrived at eight, with two camera operators and a boom microphone. The clockmaker across the street was standing in his doorway with his arms folded.
"Wren, is this a political marriage?"
"Callum, is this about the gala video?"
"Wren, will you drop the petition now that you're a Beaumont?"
Callum stepped in front of the door so that the cameras could not film her fumbling for her keys. He did not speak. When she had the door open, he turned to go in after her, and a reporter called out, "Callum, does your fiancée support the Harborline Renewal plan?"
He stopped. He looked back at Wren.
She stepped out onto the step. "No," she said. "She doesn't. And she'll tell you why at the city council meeting in April. You're welcome to come." She went back inside. Callum followed and shut the door.
Inside, she hung up her coat and put on her olive-green canvas apron. He made two coffees in the little espresso machine behind the counter. He put cinnamon in hers without asking. She noticed, and she did not say so.
That afternoon Callum drove to Halvergate alone. Wren only heard what happened from Pippa, who texted her at five: He went to Dad's press office. No cameras. He apologized to Owen. A second text followed: Owen is Dad's press aide. The one Callum yelled at on video last year. That clip was real. He never apologized before.
Wren read the messages twice and put her phone away without replying.
* * *
At midnight on Friday, Wren was still at the press.
The wedding invitations had to be printed on Old Nell, and Old Nell was misbehaving. The platen, the flat steel plate that pressed paper against the type, had drifted out of alignment. Every card came out darker on the left than the right.
Callum had driven her down after dinner. Around eleven she went upstairs to check on Nonno Teo, sat down on the edge of his sofa for five minutes, and fell asleep.
When she woke, it was after two. The light was on downstairs.
* * *
Callum had found the manual in a drawer under the counter. It was in German, from 1961, with diagrams. He had found an English version on his phone, and a video made by a retired printer in Ohio, and he had watched the video four times.
The platen had four adjustment bolts, one at each corner. He had loosened them a quarter turn at a time, pulled a test card, checked it against the light, and tightened them again. The first three test cards had come out worse than before. The fourth was better. By the ninth he had understood that the bolts worked against each other, so that tightening one corner loosened the opposite one, and that the only way through was patience. His sleeves were rolled up. His hands were black with ink to the wrist. There was a smear of it across his jaw where he had pushed his hair back.
He heard her on the stairs, but he did not turn around. He pulled another test card.
Wren came and stood beside him. She took the card from his hand and held it under the lamp. The impression was even from edge to edge.
"Upper left bolt," she said. "One more eighth."
He turned it. She fed a card. Old Nell's arms swung, the platen closed, and the card came out clean.
They worked like that for an hour, without talking, except when she said a number or he asked a question. She fed the cards. He stacked them. The press made its steady sound, like a slow heartbeat.
At some point she yawned and rested her forehead against the cool metal of the cabinet for a second, and he looked at her, at the pencil through her hair and the navy ink on her fingertips, and understood with total clarity that he was in trouble.
No, he thought. You don't get to do that. She still thinks it was you.
Clause 2 said he had twenty-four hours to tell her.
He stacked the next card and said nothing.
* * *
On Sunday morning, a small white box sat on the kitchen counter in Larkspur Heights, next to the coffee machine.
Inside were fifty business cards. Callum R. Beaumont, Director, Harbor Legal Aid. The same words, set in Ashgrove Serif, printed by hand on heavy card. The space between the capital T and the r in Trust was exactly right.
There was no note. Wren was upstairs, with her door closed.
He took one card out and turned it over. On the back, very small, in pencil, she had written the point size and the spacing value, the way she marked every proof. He put that card in his wallet and the rest in his briefcase.
* * *
On Monday evening, Wren was at the composing table, setting the names for the wedding program, when her phone buzzed. Then it buzzed again, and again.
Dahlia had sent a link. So had Pippa. So had a number she did not recognize.
The Glass Column had posted a new story. The headline read: THE BEAUMONT BRIDE'S SECRET DIARY. Below it was a single scanned image.
It was a page from her sketchbook. March 2016. A pencil drawing of the Ashgrove Row rooftops, and under it, in her handwriting at seventeen, a list titled Things I will never tell anyone at Marrow Hill.
Wren stared at it. She enlarged the image with two fingers. The scan was sharp and flat, made on a flatbed scanner, not photographed. She could see the faint dent where she had pressed too hard on the word never.
It was not one of the fourteen pages @HallMonitor had posted. She had counted those pages a hundred times. This one had never been published. It had been in the sketchbook, and the sketchbook had disappeared from her locker the week it all happened, and she had never seen it again.
Only the person who took it could have this page.
Callum came in from the back room with two cups of coffee. He saw her face, then the screen.
Wren turned the phone toward him.
"You kept them," she said.