Tyler Reyes walked into The Gilded Spoon on a Thursday evening wearing the same easy grin he'd used on Wren for two years of high school, and the sight of him standing at the host stand, scanning the dining room for her, made her stomach drop the way it always did when a piece of her old life wandered uninvited into her new one.
"There she is," he said, when he spotted her coming out from the back with a tray of clean glasses. "I heard you worked here. Took some convincing to get a table without a reservation, but here I am."
"Here you are," Wren agreed, setting the tray down carefully rather than dropping it the way she wanted to. "What do you need, Tyler?"
"Need? Nothing. Just wanted to see you." He leaned against the host stand with the particular confidence of someone who had never once considered that a conversation might not go his way. "People are saying things, you know. About your family. About some old money nobody knew the Calloways still had. Figured I'd hear it from you instead of the rumor mill."
And there it was — the actual reason for the visit, laid bare in one careless sentence. Wren felt something in her chest go very cold and very clear at the same time, the fog of old affection burning off all at once to reveal exactly what it had always been underneath.
"You dumped me because my family didn't have money," she said, quiet enough that it wouldn't carry to nearby tables, steady enough that he couldn't mistake it for hurt. "And now you're here because a rumor says maybe we do. I don't need you to spell it out any clearer than that."
Tyler's grin faltered, just slightly. "That's not — I just think we never really got closure, that's all. I miss talking to you."
"You had four months to miss talking to me and didn't send one text," Wren said. "I'm not interested in catching up, Tyler. I have work to do."
He followed her a few steps anyway, lowering his voice like that would make the words land softer. "Come on, Wren. Don't be like that. I made a mistake, okay? I was seventeen and stupid and my parents were on my case about — look, it doesn't matter what they said. I'm saying I was wrong. If there's actually something to this rumor, if your family's got money nobody knew about, that changes things, doesn't it? We could—"
"There's nothing to change," Wren said, cutting him off before he could finish whatever sentence he thought might work on her. "Even if every rumor in this city turned out to be true tomorrow, it wouldn't change what you did or why you did it. You didn't want me when you thought I had nothing. I'm not interested in you wanting me now because you think I might have something after all."
He didn't have an answer for that. She watched it land, watched the practiced charm falter for just a second before he recovered it, shrugging like the whole conversation had been a joke he was gracious enough to let her have.
She picked the tray back up and walked away before he could find another angle to work, aware of exactly how much steadier her voice had sounded than she'd expected it to, aware, too, of a small, fierce satisfaction sitting underneath the discomfort of the encounter — the same satisfaction she'd felt facing down Bree in the hallway two weeks earlier, the feeling of a door closing cleanly instead of being left ajar out of habit or fear.
• • •
Adrian had been at the host stand for most of the exchange, reviewing a delivery invoice that clearly required far less of his attention than he was giving it, and Wren caught him watching as Tyler finally gave up and left without ordering anything.
"Old friend?" Adrian asked, when she passed close enough for the question to be quiet.
"Ex-boyfriend. He heard a rumor and got curious." She said it lightly, expecting the conversation to end there, and was faintly surprised to see something flicker across Adrian's usually composed expression — brief, almost embarrassed, gone as quickly as it appeared.
"I wasn't listening in," he said, which was obviously not entirely true, and then, a beat later, with the air of someone deciding honesty was less awkward than pretending otherwise: "Actually, I was listening in. I don't usually. I don't know why I did this time."
Wren felt her own mouth curve, unbidden, at the sight of Adrian Voss — composed, unflappable Adrian Voss, who'd once shut down an entitled customer without raising his voice — looking faintly caught out over eavesdropping on a conversation with her ex.
"Were you worried he was going to convince me?" she asked, more teasing than she'd meant to sound.
"No," he said, too quickly, and then laughed at himself, a short, surprised sound she hadn't heard from him before. "Maybe a little. Which isn't really my business, and I apologize for hovering."
"You can hover a little," Wren said, and meant it, and they both let the moment sit there a beat too long before Adrian cleared his throat and returned, with visible effort, to the invoice he clearly hadn't read a word of. It was a small thing — an admission, an apology, a shared laugh — but it settled into Wren's chest with a warmth that had nothing to do with the restaurant's kitchen heat, and she found herself smiling about it on and off for the rest of her shift, in a way she hadn't let herself smile about anything in longer than she could remember.
• • •
Energized by the clean, unhesitating way she'd handled Tyler, Wren called Nolan Pierce that same night from a payphone outside the library — one of the last few left in the city, kept alive apparently by exactly the kind of person who needed to make a call without it appearing on any bill in her house.
"Miss Calloway," he said, once she'd identified herself, his voice older and rougher than she'd pictured from the careful handwriting of his letter. "I'm glad you called. I'd like to meet in person, if you're willing. There are things easier to discuss face to face than on paper, for reasons I think you can probably guess."
"I can meet whenever works for you," Wren said, gripping the phone tightly enough that her knuckles ached.
"Give me a week," he said. "I want to check something in my own old files first — I kept certain records after the firm closed, more out of habit than necessity, but I want to be certain of what I remember before I tell you anything that might not hold up. I owe your parents that much accuracy, at least."
She thanked him, hung up, and stood by the payphone for a long moment turning his words over. Things easier to discuss face to face. A week to check his own records. Whatever Nolan Pierce knew, he was being careful with it in a way that suggested weight, not vagueness — the caution of a man who understood exactly how much damage the truth could do once it was spoken aloud, and wanted to make sure he got it exactly right before he did.
A week felt both impossibly long and nowhere near long enough, not with the shares ceremony now sitting less than three weeks out on the calendar taped inside her closet door. She did the math again on the walk back from the payphone, the same math she'd been doing every night for days: a week until Nolan would see her, leaving barely two weeks after that to turn whatever he told her into something that mattered before Marguerite's deadline arrived and whatever this was got locked away for good behind a signature nobody could undo. She quickened her pace without meaning to, half-jogging the last block home, as if urgency in her legs could somehow make the calendar move faster too.
• • •
The walk home from the bistro took her down the same three streets it always did, past the same shuttered shops and the same streetlight that had been flickering for as long as she could remember, and it was somewhere along the second block that Wren became aware of footsteps behind her that didn't quite match the rhythm of anyone simply walking the same direction by coincidence.
She'd learned, in eighteen years of navigating a house full of people who resented her, to trust the small prickle at the back of her neck that told her when she was being watched. She slowed her pace slightly, then turned at the corner where the streetlight buzzed and caught its light — and found Bree standing half a block back, frozen mid-step, clearly having hoped to close the distance unnoticed.
"Bree." Wren didn't bother hiding her surprise, or her irritation. "Are you following me?"
For a moment Bree looked like she might deny it outright, the old reflexive defensiveness rising in her expression. Then something in her shoulders dropped instead, some fight going out of her that Wren had never seen leave before.
"I don't know what I'm doing," Bree said, and it was the first thing she'd said to Wren in weeks that didn't sound rehearsed or cruel. "I just — I need to know what you know. Please."
Wren studied her cousin's face in the buzzing streetlight, searching for the trap she was certain had to be hiding somewhere in this sudden shift, and found, to her genuine surprise, something that looked almost like fear instead.
"Why now?" Wren asked, unwilling to let her guard down entirely, no matter how convincing the fear on Bree's face looked. "You've had weeks to ask me anything you wanted. Why follow me tonight?"
Bree's jaw worked for a second before she answered, like she was deciding how much of the truth she could stand to say out loud on a street corner. "Because I heard something I wasn't supposed to hear, and I can't stop thinking about it, and I don't have anyone else I can ask who might actually know the answer." She wrapped her arms around herself, though the night wasn't cold enough to explain the gesture. "I know you probably hate me. I wouldn't blame you. But something's wrong in that house, Wren, and I think you already know what it is, and I think I'm running out of time to pretend I don't care."
"Not here," Wren said finally, because whatever this was, a street corner two blocks from home wasn't the place for it, and she wasn't ready — not yet, not with Nolan's answers still a week away — to hand over everything she'd spent a month piecing together to a cousin who had spent years treating her like something beneath notice. "Not yet."
She turned and kept walking, leaving Bree standing under the flickering light behind her, and didn't look back to see whether her cousin followed the rest of the way home — though she noted, climbing the porch steps a few minutes later, that Bree came through the front door only a handful of minutes after she did, quiet in a way Bree was never usually quiet, and went straight up to her room without a single word to anyone.