Chapter 2
WREN
The hotel room cost forty-seven solens a night and smelled like recycled air and the cleaning product someone had used to scrub the grout between the bathroom tiles.
I noticed both things at five in the morning, lying on top of the covers in the clothes I’d been wearing when the world ended, staring at a water stain on the ceiling that was shaped like nothing at all.
My phone had died somewhere around three. I hadn’t plugged it in.
I lay there for another hour watching the light behind the curtains go from black to grey to the particular pale gold that meant morning was happening whether I wanted it to or not.
Then I got up, found the charger in my bag, and plugged the phone into the wall outlet beside the desk.
I brushed my teeth. I washed my face. I did both of these things slowly and with the focused concentration of someone who understands that the moment she stops moving, the full weight of the thing is going to land on her.
The phone powered back on while I was still standing at the bathroom mirror. I heard it begin to find itself — the sequence of chimes and vibrations that meant notifications, plural, accumulating with the patient, indifferent efficiency of a tide coming in.
I gave myself until the count of ten before I went to look.
* * *
The Larkin Foundation had issued a statement at midnight. I read it standing beside the desk with my wet hands still dripping on the carpet, because I’d forgotten to bring my towel from the bathroom and it didn’t seem important enough to go back for.
The statement was four paragraphs long. The first paragraph expressed deep regret for any distress caused to the foundation’s donors and partners.
The second paragraph confirmed that the email in question had been sent without authorization by a former member of the household who no longer represented the Larkin family in any capacity.
The third paragraph named three independent firms that would be conducting a full review of foundation operations to ensure ongoing transparency and integrity.
The fourth paragraph was eleven words. After careful consideration, Wren Larkin has been removed from all foundation records.
Removed. Not fired. Not separated. Removed, like a splinter, like an error, like a name that had been entered into a ledger by mistake and was now being carefully, cleanly struck through.
I put the phone down on the desk. I picked it back up and read the fourth paragraph again, in case I’d misread it the first time.
I hadn’t. I put the phone face-down and stood there until I was certain I wasn’t going to do anything embarrassing, like put my fist through the mirror or sit down on the floor.
Then I picked the phone up again, because there was worse still waiting, and I’d learned, in twenty-two years of the Larkin family, that it was always better to understand the full size of a disaster than to meet it in pieces.
* * *
Mason’s post had gone up at half past midnight.
It was short, as these things went, and I could tell he’d drafted it carefully because the language had none of the comfortable shortcuts he used when he was being himself.
When Mason Cole was being himself, he said things like straightforward and to be fair and let’s not overcomplicate it.
When Mason Cole was crafting a public image, he used words like integrity and deeply and as a man who values.
His post had all three.
He was deeply saddened by the events of the evening. He valued integrity above all things, both professionally and personally. As a man who valued transparency, he felt it was important to clarify that his relationship with Wren Larkin had ended. He wished her well.
He wished her well.
Three years. Two thousand and thirty-one days, not that I’d been counting, not that I’d ever been the kind of woman who counted days, but I knew the number the way you know certain numbers without meaning to — the way you know how many steps it takes to cross a room you’ve crossed ten thousand times.
Three years, and the closing line was he wished her well, in the same neutral, careful language he would have used to announce a change in business hours.
I read the comments for approximately ninety seconds before I understood that this was a thing I should stop doing.
The comments were not, on balance, in my favor.
There were a handful of people who said things like this seems rushed or let’s wait for more information, and I was grateful to each of them in the impersonal way you’re grateful for a stranger holding a door.
But they were outnumbered, ten to one, by people who had already decided.
I closed the app. I opened the room service menu instead, because it was six in the morning and I hadn’t eaten since a canapé tray at seven the previous evening, and whatever was going to happen next was going to require me to have eaten something.
I ordered toast and coffee and sat on the edge of the bed to wait.
* * *
My bag was on the chair by the window — one medium duffel, dark grey, the kind that could pass as a gym bag or a weekend bag or an I-left-my-entire-life-in-the-space-of-a-single-evening bag depending on context.
I’d packed it fast, in the dark, pulling things from the closet by touch and muscle memory.
A week’s worth of clothes. My toiletries.
My laptop. The folder of personal documents I kept in the top drawer of my desk — passport, birth certificate, the certificate of adoption that Walter had framed when I was six because Diane had insisted it would make me feel more welcome, and which had always, in some small way, made me feel the opposite.
And the box from the bottom of the closet. I’d grabbed it without thinking, the way you grab the thing that belongs to you even when you can’t articulate why, even when you’ve spent years not looking directly at it.
I got up and brought the box back to the bed.
It was a shoebox, originally, from a pair of winter boots I’d had at twelve.
Somewhere along the way it had stopped being a shoebox and become the place I kept the things I didn’t know what to do with: a friendship bracelet from a girl named Petra who’d moved away in fourth grade.
A ribbon from a school competition Diane had not attended.
Two photographs of a woman I didn’t recognize, soft-focus and clearly old, found tucked inside a library book I’d taken home and never returned at age nine.
And at the bottom, wrapped in a square of tissue paper that had gone translucent with age: the bracelet.
I unwrapped it carefully even though there was no longer any real reason for care, and held it up in the thin morning light.
Gold, or something close to gold. A child’s bangle, the kind you could pass a small fist through when you were four but couldn’t get past your knuckle now.
The engraving on the inside was finer than I’d remembered, the letters more deliberate. W.A.C.
Whoever had engraved those letters had known who they were making the bracelet for. The W was the right letter for my name. But the C was not, had never been, Larkin.
I set the bracelet on the pillow beside me and dug the rest of the tissue paper out of the box.
I’d never gone through the box with any real thoroughness.
It was the box you don’t go through, the box you move from apartment to apartment and house to house because throwing it out would require making a decision about what it means to throw it out.
At the very bottom, flattened under the friendship bracelet and a folded program from a school play, was an envelope.
* * *
It was the kind of envelope that had once been white and had aged to the color of old tea, sealed and unaddressed — no name on the front, no return address, nothing written on it at all except a single line in the bottom right corner in handwriting I didn’t recognize. For when she is ready.
I sat with it in my hands for a long time.
The room service arrived. I let it in, tipped the young man at the door, and set the coffee and toast on the desk. Then I sat back down on the bed, picked up the envelope again, and slid my thumb under the seal.
The paper inside had been folded three times and was the same age-yellowed shade as the envelope.
It wasn’t long. Two paragraphs, maybe three, in the same handwriting as the outside, careful and slanted slightly to the right.
I read it once fast, the way you read something you’re afraid of, and then I read it again slowly, the way you read something that changes the shape of what you thought you knew.
The letter said, without ceremony: We did not leave you.
That is the first thing we need you to understand, if you are reading this, if any part of this reaches you.
You were not left. You were placed, in the care of people we trusted to keep you safe, in a time when keeping you safe was the only thing your father and I could think about.
We have spent every year since then trying to find a way back to you.
The letter said: The bracelet was your grandmother’s. The initials are yours — your real ones, the name you were given. W.A.C. Your father will understand the rest.
The letter said: If you have found this, then something has happened that brought you to the box.
We hoped you would never need it. We hoped you’d have a life so complete it would never occur to you to go looking.
But if you are looking, then look for the name at the bottom of this letter.
That name is your name. It has been waiting for you.
At the bottom, in slightly heavier ink, as though the writer had paused and pressed harder: Castellan. Magnus Castellan, Solenne City. He is your father. We are your family. Come home.
* * *
The coffee went cold while I read it the third time, and the fourth, and the fifth.
Magnus Castellan. The name landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water, the rings spreading out before I had any chance to stop them.
I didn’t live in a country where you could reach adulthood without knowing that name.
Magnus Castellan was Solenne. He was the Castellan Building on the north end of the city and the Castellan Wing at Solenne General and the Castellan Prize for emerging industry that the papers covered every spring.
He was the face on three separate magazine covers I could recall without trying, white-haired now but with the kind of bones that had clearly been extraordinary once, the kind of man who occupied space in a room the way weather occupied the sky.
He was also, according to a handwritten letter in an old shoebox, my father.
I found I was standing, though I didn’t remember standing.
I was at the window with the letter still in both hands, looking out at a city that looked exactly the same as it had yesterday and somehow could not possibly be, because the coordinates of the thing had shifted underneath me without my permission.
Two things lived in my chest at once: the white-hot residue of last night, the gala and Diane’s mouth and Mason’s careful, devastating silence — and something else entirely. Something that felt uncomfortably, dangerously like the first breath of a different kind of air.
Diane had told me to go back to whatever hole I’d crawled out of. She’d said it to wound, to diminish, to send me somewhere small enough that I would finally, permanently understand my place.
She had not, I was increasingly certain, had any idea what was at the bottom of that hole.
I folded the letter along its original creases and set it on the desk beside the cold coffee.
Then I sat down, opened my laptop, and began to search for the name of a private investigator.
Not because I believed it — not yet, not with any certainty, not on the basis of a single letter that could have been written by anyone for any reason.
But because I had spent twenty-two years not asking the questions I was most afraid of, and I had believed, in my most private self, that the restraint was a form of gratitude.
That choosing not to look was the price I paid for belonging.
The Larkin Foundation had removed me from all records at midnight. Mason Cole wished me well. Walter had not called.
The price of belonging, it turned out, had been a category error from the start. I had been paying into something that was never going to pay back.
I typed private investigator, Solenne City, and pressed enter, and felt, for the first time in thirty-six hours, something that was not grief and not shame but something closer to its opposite — the quiet, particular, forward-leaning sensation of a woman who has finally decided to find out exactly who she is.