Chapter 4: The Invitation Nobody Wanted
"I didn't keep anything," Callum said. He set both coffees down on the composing table, very carefully, as if they might go off. "It wasn't me, Wren. It was never me."
For ten years she had imagined him saying those words. She had imagined them in the hallway at Marrow Hill, in a letter, in a phone call on her birthday. Now he had said them, in her grandfather's print shop, at nine o'clock on a Monday night, and she found that she did not believe a single one.
"Then who?"
"Graham Vance."
She waited.
"March 2016," he said. "There was a study group at the Vance lake house, the weekend before it started. Five of us. I left my laptop open on the kitchen table. My school email was saved in the browser. Two days after the first post, I opened the laptop and found the account settings for @HallMonitor still in the history. He hadn't even logged out."
"And you told the school."
"I told my father." He looked at the coffee, not at her. "He said the Vances were not a family we made enemies of. He said I would take the suspension, three days, and it would be over. I had taken screenshots of the history. He told me to delete them. I deleted them."
The press was very quiet. Upstairs, Nonno Teo's television murmured through the ceiling.
"I have nothing to show you," Callum said. "That part is on me."
Wren picked up the phone and looked again at the scanned page. Things I will never tell anyone at Marrow Hill.
"My sketchbook was taken from my locker on the Monday," she said. "Did you ever have it?"
"No. I never saw it."
"Graham's locker was two down from mine."
"I know."
She put the phone face down. "Here's my problem. The school traced the posts to your login. You didn't deny it for ten years. You transferred. And the only person at your father's table who treated me like a human being last Tuesday was Graham." She kept her voice level. "You're asking me to trust the one thing you destroyed."
"Yes," he said. "I am. I know how it sounds."
"It sounds convenient."
"It is convenient," he said. "For me. It's also true."
She took off her apron and hung it on its hook. She did it slowly, because her hands wanted to do something faster.
"I could end this tonight," she said. "Clause 12 doesn't cover it, but Jonah would find a way."
"You could."
She thought about the Trust board meeting on April 1, which would vote on the heritage assessment. She thought about the lease that ran out on June 30, and the forty people who lived above the shops on Ashgrove Row.
"I'm not ending it," she said. "Not for you. For the street. We keep going, and I keep my eyes open."
"That's fair."
"I didn't ask if it was fair."
He nodded, and did not argue, and carried his coffee into the back room.
* * *
On Tuesday a stiff envelope arrived at the press by hand delivery.
Wren had received the Marrow Hill reunion invitation in November and thrown it straight into recycling. Class of 2016, Ten-Year Reunion, Friday, March 13, Beaumont Commons. Opening of the Class Time Capsule at 8 p.m.
This envelope held a copy of the same invitation, and tucked inside it, a small folded card. In neat, looped handwriting it said: Can't wait to see the happy couple. -G.
Wren held the card up to the window. Heavy cream stock. A thin blue border, printed, not drawn.
She went to the drawer under the counter and took out the Tidewater Holdings letter. She laid the two side by side on the composing table under the lamp. The same cream. The same weight. The same thin blue rule, set the same distance from the edge.
She stood looking at them for a full minute.
Half the law offices in Halvergate probably buy from the same paper mill, she told herself. It's a color, not a signature.
She put both in the drawer together anyway.
Dahlia arrived at four with a garment bag, a binder, and bad news. The florist had double-booked Sunday. The only white flowers left in Port Aldine on four days' notice were, according to Dahlia, "lilies, lilies, or a very sad carnation."
"No lilies," Wren said.
"I know. I told him you'd rather get married holding a stapler." Dahlia flipped a page. "Daisies. He's getting daisies from a grower upstate. Don't ask what it cost. It's on the groom."
Wren thought about the daisies left at the nurses' station at St. Brigid and said nothing.
"Also," Dahlia said, "Jonah called me to ask if the seating chart needs a confidentiality clause. I said no. He said he'd draft one anyway." She closed the binder. "I think he likes me. It's horrible."
* * *
"I'm not going," she told Callum that night, in the kitchen at Larkspur Heights.
He was at the island, reading a housing court file. He closed it.
"I think we should."
"Why? So I can stand in Beaumont Commons and watch people look at us?"
"Because I've been running from that school for ten years," he said. "I left in June of junior year and I never went back, not for graduation, not for anything. I'm done with that."
"That's your reason. It isn't mine."
"Then find your own." He leaned back. "You said you'd keep your eyes open. If I'm telling the truth, there will be something there. Someone who remembers. Something in writing. If I'm lying, you'll find that out too."
Wren considered it. She thought about the scanned page, and the cream card, and the sketchbook that had vanished from her locker ten years ago.
"Fine," she said. "I'll go. I'm going to look for proof. Not for you."
"Understood."
* * *
On Wednesday afternoon, Nonno Teo came down the stairs one careful step at a time, sat on the stool by the type cabinets, and announced that his future grandson-in-law was going to learn to set type by hand.
Callum sat beside him with a composing stick, a small steel tray the length of a ruler, in his left hand. Nonno Teo pulled open a drawer of twelve-point Caslon.
"Set her name," he said.
Callum picked out a W. Nonno Teo turned it in his fingers so that the letter faced the right way. "Upside down and backward. In the stick, everything reads like a mirror. You learn to read it backward or you don't learn at all."
W. R. E. N. Callum set them slowly, with his thumb holding each one in place. It took him four minutes.
Nonno Teo inked the letters with a small roller and pressed a scrap of card against them with the heel of his hand. He peeled the card away and held it up. WREN, clean and black.
"A printer can't lie, son," he said. "The ink shows everything. Every mistake, every shortcut. You can't talk your way past it."
Callum looked at the card for a long moment.
"Then I'd better not print anything I can't stand behind," he said.
Nonno Teo studied him over the top of his round glasses. Then he smiled, very slightly, under the white mustache, and handed him the card to keep.
Wren, at the counter with an order book, pretended she had not been listening.
When Callum had gone out to move the car, Nonno Teo tapped the counter with one finger.
"He holds the type like it might break," he said.
"He's new at it."
"Mm." Her grandfather folded his checked handkerchief into a neat square. "New people hold things carefully. So do people who have broken something before." He went back upstairs without explaining.
* * *
That evening, back at the townhouse, she needed tape to fix a torn box of paper samples. She tried the kitchen drawers, then the hall table, then the desk in the small study off the living room.
The top drawer held pens, paper clips, a roll of tape. The drawer beneath it held yellow legal pads, a stack of them, perhaps fifteen.
She would not have looked, except that the top pad had slid sideways, and she could see the margin.
Down the left side of the page, in Callum's small slanted handwriting, someone had written Wren and then a dash, and then half a sentence, and then crossed the sentence out. Below it, the same thing again. Wren, I should have. Crossed out. Wren, there's no version of this where. Crossed out. Wren, it was. Crossed out.
She lifted the corner of the second pad. The same margins. The same name, the same crossings-out. The bottom pad in the stack had a date at the top of the first page, written in the corner the way lawyers dated their notes. It was from 2019.
She put the pads back exactly the way they had been, took the tape, and closed the drawer.
Later that night, when a photographer followed them along the pier, she reached for his hand before he reached for hers. He looked down at her, surprised. She kept walking.
* * *
On Thursday morning, Graham Vance called Callum and said he happened to be in Port Aldine, and did Callum have time for coffee.
They met at the café across from the courthouse. Graham wore a cream suit and his gold V cufflinks. He ordered for both of them, the way he always had.
"You look well," he said. "Marriage agrees with you, and you haven't even done it yet."
"Three days."
"Three days." Graham smiled and stirred his coffee. "You know, it's funny. That night in February, when you were complaining about your father, I said you should marry someone relatable. Someone the public would like. And here we are." He lifted his cup. "Best idea I ever had, wasn't it?"
Callum looked at him across the table.
"You said a lot of things that night," he said.
"And you listened to one." Graham set the cup down. "I'm emceeing the reunion, did you hear? They asked me to open the time capsule. I'm told there are some interesting letters in it."
He paid the bill before Callum could reach for it.
Outside, Callum stood on the courthouse steps for a long time. He went back over that night in February, a bar in Halvergate, his father's email open on his phone. He had not mentioned Wren's name. He was nearly sure of that. Graham had mentioned it. What about that Castellano girl with the petition? Relatable. And you'd take the fight right out of her.
He had laughed it off. Then, two weeks later, he had told Graham he was going to St. Brigid to ask.
He took out his phone to call Wren, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket. After the reunion, he told himself. When there's something real to show her.
* * *
On Thursday night, Wren sat at the composing table at the press with the finished wedding invitations stacked in front of her, one hundred and twenty of them, drying.
Each card had come off Old Nell with an even impression, edge to edge, because of four bolts someone had adjusted at two in the morning. She lifted the last card off the stack. The ink had pooled on one word and bled a little into the paper around it. The word was Forever.
She was holding it up to the lamp when her phone buzzed. The number was one she did not know.
Tomorrow they open the time capsule. Be ready to finally hear the truth. A friend.