15. Chapter 15
Isla
Iwake up in Matt's bed to find him already standing across the room, phone in hand, face completely closed, and I know before he shows me the screen that something happened while I was asleep.
He crosses the room and holds the phone out without saying anything. I sit up and read it.
You cannot protect them both. Choose.
I read it again. Then I read the metadata he has already pulled up below it — his tech contact is fast, or Matt called him the moment I fell asleep, which is also possible — and I see the origin point. Sent from inside the Wrenwood estate. East wing. Frey's private office.
I set the phone on the nightstand. The nor'easter has gone quiet overnight and the loft is very still.
"He sent it from the estate," I say. "He's still there."
"He was there when he sent it," Matt says. "Whether he's still there is a different question."
I look at the phone. The message is not complicated.
It is designed to work on a man whose one genuine vulnerability is his son, and Frey has spent enough time connected to the Harrow Group to understand how to construct a pressure point.
He is not threatening Elias. He is threatening Matt's ability to protect Elias while protecting me.
I feel cold in a way that has nothing to do with the temperature.
"He knows enough about you to know where to press," I say. "He's been watching you since the engagement."
Matt looks at the window. "Yes."
"How long have you known that?"
He looks at me. "Since the Elias photograph. The school enrollment was in Calloway's name. Getting from Matthew Beckett to Elias Calloway resources and a reason to look. Someone gave him the reason." He pauses. "I think your father's initial contract gave him enough access to find the rest."
I sit with that. Conrad hired the Harrow Group to surveil me and in doing so handed a man with a private fixation the tools to conduct his own parallel operation. My father did not design this. He simply handed Frey the keys and did not ask what he was going to do with them.
"He's going to say he didn't know," I say.
"Yes," Matt says. "He's going to say that."
He calls Ruth before six.
I sit on the edge of the bed and listen to him on the phone in the hallway, his voice low and even.
I understand from the structure of the conversation that he is moving Elias again — not to Ruth's, somewhere further, a colleague's place upstate that does not appear on any document connected to Matt's name.
Ruth asks questions. He answers seven of them, the same as last time.
When he comes back into the bedroom he stands at the window with his back to me, looking out at the Brooklyn morning, the nor'easter gone and the streets below still white and quiet.
I watch his shoulders. He is very still.
The controlled stillness he has maintained for weeks, the one I have been watching and learning the texture of, is costing him something right now that I can see in the set of his spine and nowhere else.
He is a man who has been through harder things than this — I know that now, from Ruth, from the photo on the hallway wall of a younger Matt in uniform, from the way he holds himself when he is containing something rather than feeling it.
He is containing something right now. I can see the shape of it from across the room.
I get up and cross the room. I put my hand between his shoulder blades and just leave it there.
He doesn't move away. He breathes, once, in a way that is slightly slower than his usual rhythm.
Then he turns just enough to put an arm around my shoulders, pulling me to his side.
I stand with him, my head on his shoulder, my hand on his chest, and the Brooklyn morning happening outside the window.
Neither of us says anything, because there's nothing that needs to be said right now and we both know it.
The city has come back to itself after the storm — a garbage truck somewhere below, the sound of someone's footsteps on the cleared sidewalk — and we stand in the quiet of the loft above it.
After a while he puts his hand over mine, briefly, and then he picks up his phone and gets back to work.
I go find my clothes and think about what I am going to do today, which I have already decided and which I'm not going to tell him.
I don't tell him I am going to the estate.
I know what he would say, and I know he would be right about the security assessment, and I know the correct version of this conversation ends with me agreeing to wait.
I also know I'm doing the thing I always do — deciding what other people can handle before they've been given the chance to decide for themselves. I know this. I'm choosing it anyway.
I also know that Conrad Wrenwood doesn't say real things in front of people he doesn't fully control, and Matt's presence in that room would give my father a role to play instead of a daughter to answer to.
I have watched Conrad manage the room Matt is in.
I've never once watched him fail to manage it.
If I bring Matt, I lose the one advantage I have, which is that I'm Conrad's daughter and he still, on some level, wants me to think well of him.
I am going to use that.
I text Matt from the car when I'm already on the highway.
Isla: Going to the estate. Alone. I'll explain when I get back.
Then I silence the notifications, because I know what the response will be and I don't need it in my ear while I'm driving.
I have two hours to Connecticut. I use them to run the conversation I'm about to have, every version of it, until I know which questions to ask and in what order and how to listen to the answers.
Conrad is in his study when I arrive. He looks at me, and then at the empty doorway behind me, and something in his expression shifts — surprise, quickly managed. He wasn't expecting me without Matt.
Good.
I sit down across from his desk without being invited. He doesn't offer me coffee. I do not ask for it. We're past the domestic courtesies today.
"Did you know Martin Frey was escalating beyond what you contracted him for?"
Conrad is quiet for a long moment.
"Yes," he says.
Just that. He doesn't dress it up or reach for a qualifier and I register this, because Conrad Wrenwood almost never gives a plain yes.
He's deciding something. What he is deciding is how much of the true version to offer, and the fact that he's offering any of it tells me he has already calculated that I have enough to work with regardless, and that the controlled version is better for him than the unraveled one.
"He told me his interest in you had grown beyond the scope of information gathering," Conrad says.
"That the engagement had complicated things for him in ways he hadn't anticipated.
I made a judgment call. I kept Beckett in place rather than disclosing what I knew, because I was concerned that if I disclosed it you would pull out of the arrangement and remove yourself from protection entirely. "
I look at my father.
"That isn't a judgment call," I say. "You knew who was doing this. You knew his name. You had his office thirty feet from your breakfast table and a key to my apartment in his pocket, and you said nothing."
"I was managing the situation."
"You were managing me." I look at him. "There's a man who has been watching me sleep, Dad.
Who sent a photograph of Beckett's seven-year-old son to a charity gala.
Who was in this house last night at three in the morning, in his office, sending threats to me, while drawing a paycheck from you.
And you knew. You looked at me across that table yesterday and you watched me drink my coffee and you knew, and you said nothing. "
Conrad's expression does not change. That is almost worse than if it did.
"I was protecting you," he says. I snort.
"From what? From knowing? From being able to make an informed decision about my own safety?
" My voice is level. I am furious and I am keeping it level because losing it in front of Conrad is the one thing I will not give him.
"You weren't protecting me. You're protecting you from the optics.
It doesn't look very good that your daughter's stalker is your own assistant, does it? "
"I was going to handle it," he says.
"When?" I ask. "Before or after he escalated to a seven-year-old?"
He doesn't answer. That is also an answer.
"Handle it," I repeat. "Like everything else. On your timeline, your terms, with me in the dark until you decided I needed to know." I pick up my bag. "That's not protection. That's just control with better PR."
I walk out. My hands are shaking by the time I reach the car, which I allow, because I am alone and no one is watching.
The door closes behind me and I stand on the front steps for a moment in the cold Connecticut air.
The estate looks the same as it always has — the grounds, the hedges, the gardener's tracks in the snow from this morning.
I have stood on these steps hundreds of times in my life at the end of visits that went well and visits that did not and visits where I put on wellness so convincingly that I occasionally believed it myself.
This is the first time I've left without leaving anything unsaid.
I walk to the car.
I know this will not be the last hard conversation I have with my father.
I also know that I said every true thing I came here to say, and that he heard it, and that his jaw tightened, and that he did not have an answer.
That is not nothing. It is, in fact, the most I have ever gotten from Conrad Wrenwood, and I am going to drive back to Brooklyn and let it settle before I decide what to do with it.
I call Cole from the car before I have reached the gate.
"He admitted it," I say. "On the record, to my face. He knew Frey was escalating and he let it run."
Cole is quiet for a long moment. Then: "I've been waiting for something we could actually use."
"You have it."
"I know." He pauses. "I've been looking at the trust structure.
If we challenge the agreement — not the company, not his role at the family office, just the mechanism he uses to control our money — we can force him to release both funds unconditionally.
The Frey exposure is enough to bring to a lawyer.
It's more than enough to bring to the press, and Conrad knows it. He'll settle before it gets there."
"You've been building this."
"Six months," he says. "Quietly. I've been waiting for something clean enough to act on — a direct admission, on record, that Conrad can't walk back as a misunderstanding or reframe as him acting in your best interest. Something he said to your face that he can't unsay." A pause. "You just got it."
I look at the gate in the rearview mirror.
"Don't file anything until Frey is in custody. I don't want Conrad spooked into destroying evidence."
"Agreed." Another pause. "Matt's going to be furious."
"He's going to be furious," I confirm. "I'll handle it."
I hang up and I point the car toward Brooklyn. My phone lights up. I glance at the screen.
Matt: We need to talk.
I set the phone face-down on the passenger seat and I drive.