27. Epilogue
Epilogue
Celeste
Conrad Wrenwood arrives at Match Maven's office at ten in the morning in a suit that costs more than most people's rent and the bearing of a man who has never once waited for anything he wanted.
He is shown to my office. He sits without being invited. He does not take coffee.
"My daughter," he says, "has a problem."
I fold my hands on my desk. "Tell me about her."
He tells me. Isla Wrenwood, twenty-six, his daughter and one of two equal stakeholders in the Wrenwood Group's real estate and hospitality portfolio alongside her older brother.
Brilliant, he allows, in the way that fathers allow things about daughters they cannot quite categorize.
Relentless philanthropist — the Wrenwood Foundation funds scholarship programs and emergency shelter initiatives across three boroughs, though Conrad glosses over this in approximately eleven words.
What he spends considerably more time on is the rest of it: the gala appearances, the society columns, the photographs, the lifestyle that he describes as visibility in a tone that makes clear he means liability.
I let him talk. I have been doing this long enough to know that what a parent says about a child in the first five minutes tells you almost nothing about the child and almost everything about the parent.
Conrad Wrenwood describes his daughter the way he would describe a company with strong fundamentals and a brand problem.
He is not unkind. He is not even wrong about the facts.
But there is a gap between what he is saying and what he is actually seeing, and that gap is wide enough to build a book in.
"And the other matter," I say, when he pauses.
His jaw tightens. "A nuisance. Someone with an unhealthy interest in her movements. Gifts left inside her building. Notes at her foundation office." He waves a hand. "The security team is handling it."
Ivy, seated in the chair to my left where she has been taking notes with the focused, unhurried attention of a woman who has already identified the real problem, looks up. "Has law enforcement been involved?"
"We prefer to handle these things privately."
"Mr. Wrenwood," I say carefully, "a stalker does not typically lose interest because the subject of their attention gets married."
"I disagree," he says, with the confidence of a man who has never been disagreed with successfully.
"A high-profile engagement to someone formidable sends a message.
It changes the calculus." He leans forward.
"Two problems, one solution. She settles down.
The nuisance goes away. Everyone benefits. "
Ivy and I exchange a look over his shoulder. It is the look we have been exchanging for the three years we have worked together, the one that means: this is going to be complicated, and we are going to do it anyway.
"And if Isla doesn't want to be matched?" I ask.
"Isla," Conrad Wrenwood says, "will see reason.
She always does, eventually." He opens his jacket and places a card on my desk.
"I understand you specialize in unconventional arrangements.
I've been told you're discreet." He stands.
"Find her someone formidable. Someone who can handle her.
The trust disbursement is contingent on her cooperation. "
He leaves.
The office is very quiet for a moment.
Ivy looks at the door. "He froze her trust."
"Apparently."
"Because she parties too much."
"And because a man left gifts inside her penthouse and he'd prefer not to involve the police." I pick up the card. "He's not wrong that she needs protection. He's entirely wrong about everything else."
Ivy is quiet for a moment, tapping her pen against her notepad in the rhythm she uses when something is assembling itself in her mind. I have learned to wait for this. It always produces something worth waiting for.
Then she sets down her pen. "Julia's in Positano."
"For another three weeks, yes."
"So this one's mine." It is not a question.
"This one is yours," I agree.
She stands and walks to the filing cabinet by the window — the one that holds the non-standard client materials, the cases that don't fit the intake form, the situations that require what Julia used to call unconventional solutions before she became one herself.
She opens the second drawer. She flips through several folders, stops, pulls one out, and looks at it for a moment.
Then she crosses back to my desk and sets the folder in front of me.
I open it.
The photograph is clipped to the inside cover. A man in his early thirties, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, with the controlled stillness of someone who has learned to read rooms before entering them. The name on the tab reads: Beckett, Matthew. Apex Elite Security Group.
Graham's security firm. The one he retained after the Andrews Tech breach. The one Graham described, in the understated way Graham describes everything, as thorough.
I look at the photograph for a moment. I think about Conrad Wrenwood's request for someone formidable.
I think about a woman who funds scholarship programs across three boroughs and whose father describes her philanthropy in eleven words.
I think about what happens when you put someone who has been treated as a problem to be solved in the same room as someone who has spent his entire career solving problems.
I close the folder.
"He's not in our database," Ivy says. "It'll take some convincing."
I smile. "Good thing you're persuasive."
She takes the folder back. At the door she stops and looks over her shoulder. "One more thing. The stalker."
"Yes."
"He's not going to go away because she gets a ring on her finger."
"No," I say. "But he might go away if the man she's with spent twelve years as a Navy SEAL and now runs the best private security operation in the city." I pause. "Conrad isn't entirely wrong. He's just wrong about the mechanism."
Ivy looks at the folder in her hands. Something shifts in her expression — not quite a smile, something more like the look of a person who can already see how this ends and is deciding whether that's a good thing.
"Isla Wrenwood," she says, almost to herself. "And Matthew Beckett."
"See if you can get him in," I say. "Don't tell him about the heiress until he's already sitting down."
Ivy laughs — short, sharp, the laugh of someone who has done this long enough to know exactly which conversations are going to be interesting. She tucks the folder under her arm.
"Leave it to me," she says, and closes the door.
I sit for a moment in the quiet of my office. Outside the window the city is doing what it always does — indifferent, continuous, absolutely full of people who haven't found their person yet.
I think about Isla Wrenwood, who funds shelters and scholarships and whose father spent forty minutes describing her party photographs.
I think about Matthew Beckett, who Graham described as thorough with the emphasis of a man who watched someone do a full security audit of his building in forty-eight hours and come away with findings nobody else had caught.
I think about what happens when a woman who has been managing her own life for twenty-six years, in spite of everyone who has tried to manage it for her, meets a man whose entire professional existence is built around understanding exactly how things go wrong and stopping them before they do.
I think about Julia Simmons, who told me she didn't do fake corporate arrangements when I walked into her office nine weeks ago. Who is currently in Positano with the man she coached on sincerity, engaged to be married, teaching him how to make chicken piccata.
I have been doing this for a while now. I know what a match looks like before the people involved do.
I pick up my coffee. I get back to work.