5. Chapter 5
Isla
Iam standing in the lobby of the Meridian Hotel in four-inch heels and a dress that cost more than most people's rent, about to walk into our first public appearance as an engaged couple, and I am angrier at my father than I have ever been in my life.
This is not new information. I have been angrier at Conrad Wrenwood than I have ever been in my life approximately four times in the last six years, and each time I have revised the ceiling upward.
Tonight's version has to do with the Harrow Group, which I spent two hours researching this afternoon after Beckett mentioned the name with a flatness that told me he already knew what it was.
The Harrow Group is not a security firm.
The Harrow Group manages information, which is a polite way of saying that for the last several months my father has been paying someone to decide what I get to know about my own life.
Beckett appears at my shoulder in a dark suit with his earpiece in and says nothing, which is what he does when he is giving me time to compose myself.
So I compose myself, because I am good at that, and I walk into the Meridian's ballroom with my chin up and my smile ready and my hand tucked into the crook of his arm.
"You look like you're going to war," he says, low, near my ear.
"I look like I'm attending a charity benefit," I say.
"Same thing, apparently."
I glance up at him. The corner of his mouth is doing the two-millimeter thing.
I face forward and remind myself that I am angry at my father, not charmed by my fake fiancé.
Though I suppose one could argue that those are two separate and unrelated emotional states that I am fully capable of maintaining simultaneously.
Which does not make the second part a good or healthy idea.
The ballroom is already half full when we walk in, which is exactly how I like to arrive — late enough to make an entrance, early enough to work the room before dinner pins everyone to their tables.
I feel the shift when we cross the threshold, the small but perceptible reorientation of attention that happens when a Wrenwood enters a Wrenwood Foundation event.
It used to bother me. Now I use it the same way Beckett uses his silences — as a resource, deployed with intention.
He feels it too. I can tell by the way his posture adjusts, almost imperceptibly, from escort to something more alert.
He is reading the room the way he reads everything — for threat, for angle, for the thing that doesn't fit. I wonder, not for the first time, what it’s like to walk into every room already looking for what's wrong.
The Wrenwood Foundation's quarterly benefit is exactly the kind of event I normally love.
Open bar, string quartet, a room full of people I can talk into writing checks for battered women's shelters and free clinics if I catch them at the right moment with the right question.
I know how to work this room. I have been working rooms like this since I was seventeen years old and Conrad first put me in front of a board table and said smile, Isla, like this was a complete sentence.
Tonight every smile is a performance laid over a simmer I cannot entirely control, but I have been performing over worse, and the simmer gives me an edge that I decide to use rather than suppress.
Beckett stays at my left shoulder. Close enough that the warmth of him is a constant, close enough that the hand on the small of my back feels like something that belongs there, and I introduce him to three board members as my fiancé with the warmth of a woman who is very pleased about the situation and wants everyone to know it. It is, objectively, my best work.
Across the room, Ivy watches me run the table on the foundation's largest donor and texts me a thumbs-up. I text back a single diamond emoji and keep moving.
"You're good at this," Beckett says, between the second and third board member.
"I know."
"That wasn't a compliment."
"I know that too." I take a glass of Sancerre from a passing tray and hand it to him without asking. "Drink it. You look like security."
He takes the glass. Does not drink from it. Continues to look like security.
I suppress a sigh and introduce him to the fourth board member.
The bar is at the far end of the ballroom, which is where I go when I need ninety seconds of not performing, and I am halfway through my second glass of water when Derek Voss materializes at my elbow.
I know Derek Voss the way you know furniture — he has been a mid-level associate in my father's corporate office for four years, present at enough family events to be recognizable, forgettable enough that I have never thought about him twice.
Until now, when he is standing too close.
I register this before I register anything else about him, the way you register a change in air pressure before you see the weather.
"Isla." He says my name like we’re friends. We are not friends. "You look incredible tonight."
"Derek." I keep my smile exactly where it is. "I didn't know you'd be here."
"Your father thought it would be good to have some family office representation." He turns slightly, angling his body in a way that blocks my sightline to the room, and drops his voice. "He wanted me to check in. See how things are going with the arrangement."
I look at him. "Things are going fine."
"Good." His hand lands on my forearm. Not a brush — a grip.
Possessive — fingers wrapping around my wrist with a pressure that is not accidental and is not friendly and is not something I have given him any reason to think is welcome.
"He worries, you know. He just wants to make sure you're comfortable. That you're being taken care of."
I smile at him. I am very good at smiling at people I would like to remove from my immediate vicinity. "I appreciate the concern," I say. "You can tell him —"
His grip tightens.
It’s a small thing. One additional pound of pressure. But it’s deliberate, and it lands in the part of me that has spent the last week having my perimeter violated in progressively more personal ways, and something in me goes very cold and very still.
And then Beckett is there.
I don't see him move. One moment he is not in my peripheral vision talking to Ivy and the next he is beside me, and his hand is on Voss's wrist, and Voss has gone the color of a man whose body has just received information his brain is still processing.
Beckett is not touching him hard. He doesn't need to.
He has found, with the unhurried precision of someone who knows exactly where to press, a point that makes the choice between compliance and pain extremely clear.
He leans in close enough that I can hear him, his voice dropped to a register that doesn't carry past the three of us. I only catch pieces — enough to understand the shape of it — and then Voss has gone very still.
Voss straightens his jacket. He looks at me once — not with the entitlement he came in with, with something considerably less comfortable — and walks away without another word.
Beckett steps back to my left shoulder. Picks up his Sancerre and takes a sip, finally, and looks out at the ballroom like nothing happened.
"What did you say to him?" I ask.
"Nothing interesting."
"Beckett."
"I told him his job description didn't include putting his hands on you." A pause. "And that if he disagreed, he was welcome to take it up with me somewhere quieter."
I look back at the ballroom. Something has shifted in my chest, low and warm, and I have already identified it and filed it under things I am not examining tonight. "He won't tell my father," I say.
"No," Beckett agrees. "He won't."
We stand there for a moment, side by side at the edge of the room, and then I put my hand back in the crook of his arm and we go back to work.
I find the envelope at nine-fifteen, when we are seated at the foundation table for the program portion of the evening and I am flipping through my event booklet looking for the order of speakers.
It is tucked between the pages, small and cream-colored and unsealed. For a moment I think it is a donation card or a business card someone has slipped in at the last minute. Then I open it.
Inside is a photograph. Printed on regular paper, the way you'd print something at home.
A boy — seven years old, dark-haired, wearing a backpack that is slightly too big for him — caught mid-stride on a sidewalk outside what looks like an elementary school.
Afternoon light. Candid. He does not know he is being photographed.
I know who he is. I have seen him once, for approximately ninety seconds, dragging a backpack and asking his father about iguana respiration.
I know his name. And I know that this photograph was taken yesterday, because yesterday was the first morning Elias Beckett went to school while his father was still awake at a drafting table down the hall, running threat files instead of sleeping, because of me.
Below the image, in handwriting that is neat and deliberate: The ring isn’t enough protection.
I close the envelope.
I do it under the table, with my hands completely steady, while the foundation's executive director takes the stage twelve feet away and begins thanking our major donors.
Beckett is to my left, facing forward, and I can feel the quality of his attention even when it isn't directed at me — the way the room is always slightly more organized in his vicinity, the way exits are always noted.
I put the envelope in my clutch.
He cannot see this photograph tonight. I have watched Matthew Beckett be controlled and methodical and icily competent under pressure for the better part of a week, and I know, with a certainty I cannot entirely explain, that what is in this envelope will undo all of that.
Not because he is not good at his job. Because he is a father, and whoever put this in my program understands that, and used it, and I am not handing him that detonator in the middle of a public event where the consequences of a reaction could be measured in press coverage.
I will tell him. I will tell him everything. Just not here.
Not tonight.
The executive director thanks the Wrenwood family by name and I look up and smile, and beside me Beckett says something low about the deputy mayor at table six, and I answer him in a normal voice, and the envelope sits in my clutch like a stone, and I do not look at it again.