Chapter 5: Class of Regrets
The name tag at the registration table in Beaumont Commons said WREN CASTELLANNO, with one n too many. Ten years, Wren thought, pinning it to her coat, and Marrow Hill Academy still had not learned to spell her name.
Callum's tag was spelled correctly. It also had a small gold star printed beside it, which meant he had been on the reunion's donor list. He peeled the star off with his thumbnail and put it in his pocket.
Beaumont Commons was the old stone quadrangle at the center of the school, roofed in glass twenty years ago so that it could be rented for weddings. Tonight it held a bar, a jazz trio, and about two hundred people in their late twenties trying to look as if they had done well. The clock tower rose above the glass roof at the north end. To the east stood the library, with VANCE WING cut into the stone over its doors in letters two feet high.
Wren had not been inside the Commons since the afternoon in March 2016 when she had walked across it with her head down and her sketchbook gone.
"You don't have to stay," Callum said quietly.
"I'm not here for you," she reminded him, and took a glass of sparkling water from a passing tray.
* * *
It went the way she had expected. People looked. Conversations stopped when she passed and started again behind her, a little lower. She heard scholarship once, and the petition girl twice. Some of them came over. A girl who had sat behind her in chemistry told her she had always loved her drawings, and Wren thanked her and did not mention that the girl had once reposted page six. A former lacrosse captain shook Callum's hand for much too long and asked about the gala video.
Then a woman in a black blazer, with a short dark bob and a notebook sticking out of her pocket, stopped in front of them.
"Tessa Lin," she said. "Port Aldine Ledger. We had AP History together."
"I remember," Wren said. "You sat by the window and corrected the teacher."
"Still do." Tessa smiled, not unkindly. "I'll just ask. Is this a love story or a campaign strategy?"
"It's a printing business, mostly," Wren said. "Come by the shop. I'll show you a Heidelberg Windmill."
Tessa wrote something down. "I might."
Across the Commons, near the clock tower, Wren saw a woman with close-cropped gray hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain, standing alone beside a pillar. Ms. Ngozi Okafor had been the faculty advisor of The Marrow Quarterly when Wren was its design editor. She was the vice principal now. She was looking at Wren, and she did not look away.
* * *
At eight o'clock the jazz trio stopped. Graham Vance walked onto the small stage in a cream suit, tapped the microphone, and smiled at everyone as if they were old friends, which, Wren supposed, for him they were.
"Class of 2016," he said. "Ten years ago, we sealed a box. Tonight, we open it."
Two maintenance workers wheeled out a steel trunk, dented at one corner, with a brass plate that read MARROW HILL CLASS OF 2016, SEALED MAY 20. They cut the security seal with bolt cutters. Graham lifted the lid.
The room crowded forward. There were yearbooks, a jersey, a flash drive, a phone from 2016 in a plastic bag, and a bundle of envelopes tied with ribbon: letters written by students to be opened in ten years.
Graham began handing them out by name. There was laughter. Someone read a letter to herself about the boy she was going to marry, and the boy, now bald, cheered.
Then Graham held up a long white envelope and read the front aloud.
"To Wren Castellano. From Callum Beaumont." He raised his eyebrows at the crowd. "Well. Given the news, I think we have to hear this one."
He did not read it himself. He handed the envelope and the microphone to the lacrosse captain, who opened it, unfolded a single typed page, and began to read before anyone could stop him.
"Wren. They'll tell me to apologize. I won't. You put yourself on display in that magazine, and you got what that gets you. If I had it to do again, I would do it again."
The captain stopped. The Commons had gone completely silent. Two hundred people turned, as one, to look at Callum.
Callum stepped toward the stage.
Wren put her hand flat against his arm without looking at him. He stopped.
She walked to the stage by herself. The captain handed her the page as if it were hot. She held it under the stage lights.
It was a laser print on ordinary office paper. The text was set in a clean sans serif with a slightly rounded lowercase t and an unusual lowercase g with a flat, open tail.
She knew that g. She had licensed the family for a client's annual report the year before.
"This is Halden Grotesk," she said. She did not need the microphone. The Commons was quiet enough. "It was released by a type foundry in Copenhagen in September 2019. It did not exist in 2016. Nobody in this class could have typed a letter in it before we graduated."
She held the page up so the front rows could see it.
"This letter was typeset in a font that didn't exist until 2019."
For a second nobody said anything. Then people began to talk all at once.
Graham laughed, easily, into the microphone. "Well. Someone's idea of a joke, clearly. I'm sorry, Wren. Let's get the rest of these handed out, shall we?"
Around the Commons, people were already holding up their phones, photographing the page in Wren's hand, the steel trunk, the stage. By morning, she knew, the words Halden Grotesk would be on a hundred screens.
Graham picked up the next envelope. His smile did not change at all. Wren watched his hands, and they did not shake.
* * *
Ms. Okafor was waiting at the foot of the stage.
"Both of you," she said. "Now, please."
She led them through the Vance Wing, up a back staircase, and along a corridor Wren had not walked in ten years. At the end of it was a door with a faded sign: THE MARROW QUARTERLY. The room inside was smaller than Wren remembered. The old drafting table was still under the window.
Ms. Okafor unlocked a filing cabinet and took out a brown envelope, soft at the corners from being handled.
"In June 2016," she said, "a student gave me a letter and asked me to give it to you after graduation." She looked at Callum. "Handwritten. Four pages. Two days later, the headmaster called me into his office. The Beaumont family had just pledged the funds for the new library wing. He told me the matter was closed, and that delivering a letter would reopen it. I was told what reopening it would mean for my position."
"You kept it," Wren said.
"I kept a copy. I gave the original back to the headmaster, and I never saw it again. I couldn't throw the copy away." She held the envelope out. "There's something else in there."
Wren opened it. On top was a photocopy of four pages of handwriting, a younger, rounder version of the slanted hand from the legal pads. Beneath it was a computer printout, three pages long, with columns of dates, times, and numbers.
"The school's login server records where each sign-in comes from," Ms. Okafor said. "The IT director printed this for me in March 2016, when I asked him to check. Every @HallMonitor post was made within minutes of a sign-in to Callum's school account from an outside address. He traced the address." She pointed to a line near the bottom, underlined in pencil. "An internet account at a lake house registered to the Vance family."
Wren read the line twice.
"And the trunk?" Callum asked. "Where has it been for ten years?"
"In the vault under the library." Ms. Okafor took off her reading glasses. "It was moved once. In 2023, when the Vance Wing was renovated, everything in the vault was boxed up for three months and brought back. The Vance family paid for the renovation. There's a sign-in book for the vault. There always has been."
She did not say anything more about it. She did not need to.
"Why didn't you give this to me then?" she asked.
"Because I was forty-two, with a mortgage, and I was frightened," Ms. Okafor said. "That's not a good reason. It's the true one. I'm sorry, Wren."
Wren looked at the photocopied letter on top. At the first line, she could read Wren and a comma. She did not read further.
"Not tonight," she said, and put the pages back in the envelope. "Not with an audience."
* * *
They stood in the empty corridor outside the magazine room. Through the tall windows, the clock tower was lit gold against the dark.
Callum spoke first.
"My father gave the order," he said. "I made the choice. I was seventeen, and I was scared of him, and none of that matters. I let you believe it was me for ten years. I deleted the only proof. I left, and I never came back to fix it. I'm sorry, Wren."
He did not say but. She waited for it, and it did not come.
"We can go back down right now," he said. "I'll take the microphone and say all of it. Tonight."
Wren held the envelope against her chest.
"No," she said.
He waited.
"This proves what happened ten years ago," she said. "It proves nothing about who took my sketchbook page to The Glass Column last week. It proves nothing about who put a fake letter in a sealed trunk. Graham works for your father. He has a staff and a press office and a family with money. If we stand up there with one printout, he says it's old, and the story becomes you attacking your father's deputy four days before a wedding." She looked at him. "When it comes out, it comes out all at once. And it's my story too. I decide when."
"All right."
"And one more thing." She made herself say it clearly. "I believe you. I'm not ready to forgive you. Those are different sentences."
"I know," he said. "I'm not asking you to say the second one."
A draft came down the corridor from a broken window latch. She was wearing a thin dress under her coat, and she had not noticed she was cold until she was shivering. Callum took off his jacket and held it out. She looked at it for a second. Then she took it and put it on over her coat, and it came down past her hands.
* * *
They left by the side door onto the quad at half past eleven. The party was still going under the glass roof. The paths were empty.
Halfway to the parking lot, Wren looked up.
Graham Vance was standing alone under the clock tower, one hand in his pocket, a phone held to his ear. He was not talking. He was looking straight at them.
When he saw her look, he smiled.
Her phone buzzed in the pocket of Callum's jacket, where she had moved it. It was a text from a number she had saved an hour ago.
It's Tessa. Someone just called our tip line. They're shopping a story that your engagement is a contract. No documents yet. They say documents are coming.