Chapter 7: Rule Number One
On Sunday, May 17, in the third month of his fake marriage, Callum Beaumont sat on the stool beside Old Nell and did the arithmetic. He had broken Rule One seventy-one days ago, at two in the morning, with ink on his hands. Clause 2 gave him twenty-four hours to say so.
He was seventy days late.
The shop was closed. Wren was upstairs with her grandfather, and through the ceiling he could hear the two of them arguing cheerfully about a baseball game. On the composing table in front of him lay a stack of eviction files from Harbor Legal Aid and one small piece of card, the business card in Ashgrove Serif that he had kept in his wallet since March. The corners had gone soft.
He wrote the number in the margin of a legal pad. Then he crossed it out, the way he crossed out everything he wrote about her, and went back to reading a lease.
* * *
The first two months had gone faster than either of them expected.
On April 1, the board of the Beaumont Civic Trust met in the long room at Carrow House. The press had gone quiet since the wedding. There had been no new photographs of Callum, only Pippa's pictures of the two of them at the press, and one of Nonno Teo teaching Callum to set type, which had been shared more than the wedding itself. Harbor Legal Aid's funding passed its review without discussion.
The heritage assessment was the next item. The governor voted no. So did two of his appointees. Three members voted yes. The deciding vote belonged to Adaline Beaumont, who had not voted against her husband on the board in eleven years.
"Yes," she said, and did not look at him.
By the middle of April an independent panel was at work on Ashgrove Row: two architectural historians, a structural engineer, and an archivist who spent three weeks in the city records office. Their report was due in the second week of September.
The building's owner, unwilling to sell a property under formal heritage review, put the Tidewater offer on hold. At Wren's request, and as her lawyer, Callum negotiated a month-to-month extension of the Castellano Press lease. It was the first time she had asked him for professional help. She read every line of the extension with her red pen before she signed it.
Pippa launched #InkNotConcrete on the last Saturday of April with a video of Old Nell printing the hashtag on a card, one letter at a time. It reached a million views in four days. The petition passed fifteen thousand signatures.
The press became, in all but name, a campaign office. Dahlia ran volunteers from the composing table. Callum came down after court most evenings with his briefcase and a bag of takeout, and they ate at eleven at night on the stools by the type cabinets, arguing about semicolons in the neighbors' testimony letters.
"It's a semicolon," Wren said one night, "not a speed bump."
"You sound like Dahlia."
"Dahlia sounds like me." She took the last dumpling. "Eat, Senator."
It was his old nickname from Marrow Hill. She had not used it in ten years. He did not comment on it, and she used it again the next night.
* * *
Tessa Lin came to the press on the second Tuesday of May with a manila folder.
"You asked me who The Glazier is," she said. "I still don't know. But I found a former source of theirs. The Glazier sends letters asking for tips. On paper, like it's 1995." She slid a single sheet out of the folder. "She kept one."
It was heavy cream stock, with a thin blue border.
Wren went to the drawer under the counter and took out the Tidewater Holdings offer and the card signed G. She laid all three pages on the light table at the back of the shop and switched on the lamp beneath the glass.
The light came up through the paper. In the lower right corner of each sheet, faint and gray, was the same watermark: a small letter V inside a ring.
"That's not a mill mark," Wren said. "Mills put their own name in. This is a custom watermark. Someone ordered this paper specially."
Callum leaned over the table. "Vance Meridian. It's on their corporate letterhead. I've seen it on a hundred court filings."
"So a company that says it has nothing to do with Tidewater is printing Tidewater's letters," Tessa said slowly, "and The Glazier's."
"And Graham's notes," Wren said.
"Anyone at Vance Meridian could use that paper," Callum said. "Three hundred employees. It's a link, not proof."
"Then we find the proof," said Wren, and put all three sheets back in the drawer.
* * *
In late May, Wren went to the courthouse to bring Callum a file he had left on the kitchen island.
She found him in the corridor outside Housing Court, talking to a woman from the public defender's office. As Wren watched, the woman laughed at something he said and hugged him, quickly and easily, the way old colleagues do.
Wren stopped walking. Something tightened under her ribs.
You are standing in a courthouse, she told herself, jealous of a hug, in a marriage you invented. Get a grip.
She walked over and handed him the file. He introduced her. The woman shook her hand warmly and said she had signed the petition. Wren left feeling slightly ridiculous, which was, she decided, exactly what she deserved.
* * *
On the evening of Friday, June 12, Nonno Teo could not get his breath climbing the stairs.
At St. Brigid the doctors called it mild fluid on the lungs. They drained it, adjusted his medication, and kept him for two nights. The cardiologist said the valve in his heart was getting narrower, and that they would plan a procedure for the autumn.
Wren sat in the hallway outside his room at midnight, on a plastic chair, with her coat still on.
Callum arrived at twelve-fifteen, straight from a dinner in a suit. He did not say anything. He sat down in the chair beside her.
She leaned sideways until her head was on his shoulder. After a second, his arm came around her, carefully, the way he had held her hand on Ashgrove Row in March. She stayed there for a long time.
"Go home," he said at last. "Sleep. I'll sit with him."
"You have court at nine."
"I've had court at nine before."
He stayed in room 406 until six. When Wren came back at seven, he was asleep in the reclining chair, and her grandfather was awake, reading the newspaper, looking at Callum over the top of it with an expression she could not interpret.
* * *
She had read the letter at three that morning, alone at the kitchen island, after he sent her home.
Four photocopied pages, in the rounder handwriting of a boy of seventeen. He had misspelled suspension twice.
Wren, it was Graham. I found out two days after. My father says I have to take the blame and keep quiet, and I am doing what he says, which makes me a coward, and I know it. I deleted the proof because he told me to. I don't expect you to forgive me. I only didn't want you to spend your life thinking you did something to deserve it. You didn't. The drawings were good. The letter to your mom was the bravest thing I've ever read.
She read it twice. Then she folded it and put it back in the envelope.
It was not the letter that decided her. He had said all of it again, ten years later, in a corridor at Marrow Hill, without but. And for three months he had done more than say it.
At seven-thirty on Saturday morning, she took two coffees into room 406 and handed him one. Cinnamon in hers. Black in his.
"I read it," she said.
He waited.
"You couldn't spell suspension." She sat on the arm of the recliner. "I'm ready to say the second sentence. I forgive you."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded once, and held his coffee with both hands.
On the way to the car, she held his hand. There were no cameras in the St. Brigid parking lot that morning. She checked.
* * *
In July, the governor summoned Callum to his office in Halvergate.
"The Senate announcement is on August 21," his father said. "Your wife is on television every week against my jobs program. She'll stand down the petition before the announcement. Tell her."
"No."
"Then I'll tell Mr. Castellano what he attended in March. His heart can take the procedure in the autumn, I'm told. I wonder whether it can take that."
Callum drove back to Port Aldine with the window open. The highway ran along the coast, and the harbor came into view at the last bend, with the brick roofs of Ashgrove Row small and red at the edge of the water. He would tell Wren tonight. He was sure of it.
He did not tell her that night, or the next. Each night he found a reason: she was tired, the valve procedure was coming, the petition had a rally on Saturday. Each reason was real. None of them was the reason.
On August 3, the city council announced that it would vote on the Harborline Renewal rezoning on Thursday, August 20. The motion to bring the vote forward, before the heritage report was due, had come from the council president at the request of the governor's office. Graham Vance had delivered the request in person.
Wren read the notice at the composing table with Dahlia on one side and Callum on the other.
"Three weeks before the report," Dahlia said. "That's not an accident."
"No." Wren opened her laptop and filled in the form to speak at the public hearing. Each speaker got three minutes. She typed her name, her address on Ashgrove Row, and, under Organization, the words Castellano Press, est. 1922.
Callum did not offer to help her write the speech. On the first draft she left on the table overnight, he wrote only one note, in pencil, in the margin: Clause 6. This is yours.
* * *
On Saturday, August 15, Wren sat at her screen at the back of the press, drawing a ligature for the italic of her new typeface: two letters joined into one shape, so that they read as a single mark.
She had been working on it for an hour before she looked at what she had drawn.
It was a W and a C.
She sat back. The fan hummed. Out on Ashgrove Row, someone was laughing outside the bakery.
Oh, she thought. Oh no.
Clause 2. Twenty-four hours.
She went to the composing table, pulled a single sheet of the heavy cotton card she had been saving for three years, and set one word by hand. She printed it on the Vandercook, once. She folded the card and put it in her bag.
* * *
At 11:02 on Sunday night, in the kitchen at Larkspur Heights, Wren took the folded card out of her bag and walked toward him.
On the island, Callum's phone lit up. He glanced at it.
Jonah: Your father just called me. His safe was opened. Your copy of the contract is gone.
Callum read it twice. Then he looked at the card in her hand, and then at her face.
"Before you give me that," he said, "I need to tell you something. I lied to you on our wedding night."