Chapter 6 The Name on the File
* * *
The offices of Hargrove & Fenn occupied the third and fourth floors of a Georgian terrace on Davies Street, and they had looked exactly the same for as long as Cassian had been using them — which was to say they had looked the same for eleven years, which was to say they had been designed never to look any age at all.
The walls were the particular shade of grey that interior designers in this postcode called elephant and everyone else called expensive.
The carpet was dark enough to absorb the evidence of whatever you'd tracked in from the street.
The paintings — three of them, at precise intervals along the corridor — were abstract, vaguely coastal, and had cost more than most people's cars.
The whole thing communicated a very specific message: that whatever you had brought here would be handled, and no one would speak of it on the pavement afterward.
Cassian had always found this reassuring before.
He handed his coat to the receptionist without speaking and walked the familiar corridor to the conference room at the end — the one with the oval table and the view of the street below, where he had sat through seventeen different crises over the past decade, most of them involving money, several involving non-disclosure agreements, two involving the kind of press behavior that required formal response.
He had always sat in that room with the confidence of a man who had already identified three exits.
He had always, in every version of every crisis he could recall, believed he knew the shape of what was coming before the documents were opened.
He sat down.
Harriet Fenn entered forty seconds later, which was Harriet's particular form of respect — not immediately, because that suggested urgency, and Harriet did not trade in urgency.
But not late, because that suggested indifference, and Harriet did not trade in that either.
She was somewhere in her mid-fifties, with silver hair cut in a precise bob and the kind of posture that suggested she had made her spine's cooperation non-negotiable.
She was carrying a cream linen folder and a single legal pad.
She set both on the table, pulled out the chair across from him, and sat.
"You've had time to read the preliminary summary," she said.
"On the plane."
"Good." She opened the folder. "Then I won't walk you through the procedural background. I'd rather use the time for the substance."
"Please."
Harriet settled her reading glasses into place. Outside on Davies Street, a black cab passed slowly. Cassian tracked it in his peripheral vision and then returned his attention to the table.
"The inquiry," Harriet said, "was filed eleven days ago in family court.
The applicant is a woman named Vivienne Marchetti, aged thirty-eight, a French national currently resident in the Jura.
She is the older sister of Delphine Marchetti, who died three weeks ago.
" A pause. Not dramatic — Harriet did not do dramatic.
Simply the kind of pause that separated a name from what you needed to understand about it.
"Delphine was thirty-one at her death. She died of a sudden cardiac event.
There was no preceding diagnosis. She was apparently well. "
Cassian kept his hands flat on the table.
"The inquiry," Harriet continued, "relates to the paternity of Delphine's daughter.
The child's name is Juliette. She is four years old.
" Another pause. Cassian watched Harriet's face rather than the file because Harriet's face would tell him when he needed to brace.
"Vivienne is Juliette's current temporary guardian, having been named in Delphine's will.
There is no other named parent on the birth certificate.
The section allocated for the father's name reads inconnu. "
Unknown.
Cassian heard himself say: "And Delphine left a letter."
"She did." Harriet found the page and turned it to face him.
It was a photocopy of a handwritten document — French, two pages, the handwriting neat and slightly forward-slanting.
At the bottom of the second page, a name: Delphine Marchetti, followed by a date two years prior.
"This letter was found in her personal papers following her death.
It was addressed to Vivienne, not intended for distribution, and it names you as the most probable father, on the basis of a brief relationship in Geneva approximately five years ago.
Delphine states in the letter that she made the decision not to contact you while she was alive, that this was a deliberate choice to protect the quiet life she was building for her daughter, and that if anything ever happened to her, she wished Vivienne to make sure Juliette had the option of knowing her father.
" Harriet looked at him over her glasses.
"Vivienne is acting on that letter now."
Cassian looked at the French words on the page.
He could read French — functional French, the kind he'd acquired in his late twenties at a series of meetings in Geneva and Zurich and once in Lyon, which felt now like a piece of irony he was not prepared to examine.
He found his own name in the second paragraph.
Cassian Sterling. Written in her handwriting.
A name she had apparently thought about writing for some time and then, finally, committed to paper.
Not for him. For her sister. Because she had understood, he thought, that death was possible, that Juliette would need a path, and that she could not leave the world without a thread for her daughter to follow — a door, left unlocked, in case Juliette ever needed it.
He sat with that for a moment.
The city hummed faintly through the Georgian glass.
"What do we know about the timeline," he said. It came out exactly as he intended it — flat, precise, the voice he used in boardrooms when he needed to think faster than he needed to feel. "Six years ago. Geneva. Walk me through what we're looking at."
"On the basis of Juliette's current age — four years, two months — and standard gestational calculation, conception would have occurred approximately fifty-two to fifty-eight months ago.
That places it roughly five years in the past, give or take weeks.
Which aligns with the period you have already confirmed to us verbally as the weeks of the Geneva work. "
"The Arveaux collaboration," Cassian said. "I was in the city for eight weeks. January through March."
"That is the window."
He pressed two fingers against the inside of his wrist, a habit rather than a tic, and thought.
The Arveaux collaboration — a quantum photonics partnership that had eventually collapsed two years later when the lead researcher took a position in California.
He had been thirty-five years old. He had been between relationships.
He had worked, primarily, and occasionally he had eaten dinner with people, and once or twice he had done what unattached men in their mid-thirties do when the work has gone quiet for the evening and the city is Geneva and someone at a dinner table is interesting and laughing at something he'd said.
He remembered Delphine Marchetti.
Not in the way that would have made this simpler — not vividly, not as someone who had left a mark.
He remembered a dinner. He remembered a woman who had been funny and precise and who had worked in some capacity for an insurance firm whose offices were near the lake.
He remembered dark hair and a particular directness that he had found appealing, and he remembered that it had been brief, a matter of weeks, and that it had ended cleanly as these things occasionally did when both people understood the terms from the beginning.
He had not thought about her since.
He understood, sitting here now in Hargrove & Fenn's conference room with its grey walls and its coastal paintings, that this was the thing he was going to have to live with — that she had written that letter to her sister two years before she died, and lived a whole quiet life with Juliette in the time after, and he had not thought about her once.
"The DNA inquiry," he said.
"It's been formally requested. Court-ordered process, standard in these cases.
Given Juliette's age and Vivienne's status as temporary guardian, the family court's interest is the child's welfare, not — at this stage — the distribution of assets or any formal obligation.
The first question is simply whether there is a biological relationship.
" Harriet folded her hands. "I need to be direct with you, Cassian. "
"I'd prefer that."
"The inquiry cannot be resolved quietly.
I understand that is what you hoped when you contacted me yesterday, and I understand why, but I want to be unambiguous: this is a four-year-old child without a father on her birth certificate, whose mother has recently died, and whose only guardian is a thirty-eight-year-old woman in the Jura who filed this inquiry in keeping with her dead sister's letter.
The court will treat it seriously. The press will become aware of it eventually.
These things always surface." A pause. "The question is not whether this becomes known.
The question is what happens when it does. "
Cassian looked out the window at Davies Street.
A woman pushed a pram along the pavement. She was on the phone, laughing at something, her free hand gesturing. The pram was one of those modern architectural objects — matte navy, canopy angled against the winter light.
"She didn't know," he said. It was not something he had planned to say aloud.
"I'm sorry?"
"Delphine. She made a decision." He returned his attention to the table. "She decided not to tell me and then she died and her sister has decided to override that. On behalf of a four-year-old who may or may not know my name exists in some letter."