Chapter 3
WREN
I had chosen him because he had the highest rating among licensed investigators in Solenne City who did not list corporate clients prominently on their website.
I didn’t want someone accustomed to boardroom wars and confidentiality clauses that ran to forty pages.
I wanted someone who found things that had been lost, which was a different kind of work entirely.
He was in his mid-fifties, solidly built, with the kind of face that had probably been handsome in a conventional way before life had done something more interesting to it. He didn’t stand when I came in, but he did put down his pen, which I took as a form of respect.
“Sit down,” he said. “You look like you’ve been sleeping in your clothes.”
“I have been sleeping in my clothes,” I said, and sat.
He folded his hands on the desk. “What are we looking for?”
I put the letter on the desk between us and watched him read it.
He read it the way a professional reads things, without any visible reaction, though I saw him pause at the Castellan name the way everyone paused at the Castellan name, a fraction of a second longer than everything else, the involuntary hesitation of a person recalibrating their understanding of the situation.
When he finished, he set it down and looked at me steadily. “You understand that if this is accurate, it’s not a small thing.”
“I understand,” I said, “that if this is accurate, it changes everything I have believed about my life since I was old enough to believe things. Yes. I understand that.”
He held my gaze for another moment, measuring something.
Then he nodded once and picked up his pen again.
“I’ll need everything you have. Adoption certificate.
Birth certificate. Any photographs from infancy the family kept, if you can get copies.
And I’ll need a DNA sample from you, which I’ll match against whatever I can pull from public records.
The Castellan family donated to Solenne General’s genetics research wing eleven years ago.
There was a commemorative profile. Magnus Castellan’s sample is on file with the university hospital as part of a hereditary research consent form he signed in 2019. ”
“That’s very specific information to have ready,” I said.
Vale’s expression didn’t quite become a smile.
“I keep up with the city’s significant families as a professional habit.
You’d be surprised how often it becomes relevant.
” He slid a form across the desk. “Sign at the bottom. My retainer is twelve hundred solens. Standard rate for a heritage investigation. Give me seventy-two hours.”
I signed. I wrote the check. I walked back out past the elevator that still couldn’t decide whether it wanted to close and stood on the pavement outside in the thin October sun, thinking about nothing with a focused, deliberate intensity that I had learned, over twenty-two years in the Larkin house, was the closest I could get to actual peace.
* * *
Seventy-two hours is three days. I knew this mathematically and found that I could not quite make myself feel it in real time, because the hours between the moment I left Vale’s office and the moment my phone rang with his number on the screen had a texture entirely unlike ordinary time.
They were slower and faster simultaneously.
I extended my stay at the hotel one night, then a second night, and spent the intervening hours doing the thing that every person in my position would do and that I had promised myself I wouldn’t: I read about Magnus Castellan.
I had, of course, always known the broad shape of the Castellan empire in the way that everyone in Solenne knew it — the way you know the names of the mountains that bracket your city, present and enormous without requiring your daily attention.
But I had never looked closely, and looking closely now was a particular kind of exercise in disorientation.
Magnus Castellan was seventy-one years old and had built Castellan Holdings from a single freight company his own father had left him at twenty-six into a conglomerate that currently operated across real estate, infrastructure, telecommunications, and private equity.
He had been married to Elena Castellan, née Voss, for forty-eight years. They had six sons.
Six sons. I stopped on that and read it again.
Atticus Castellan, forty-five, chief executive of Castellan Holdings, who had graduated from Solenne’s most prestigious business school and gone directly into his father’s company and had been running it with what the financial press variously described as iron precision and ruthless clarity for the last decade.
His photograph showed a man with dark hair going silver at the temples, jaw set, eyes that looked directly into the camera as though they had decided to win the interaction before it started.
Julian Castellan, forty-two, who had abandoned a law degree partway through to become one of the country’s most recognized film actors and had, according to a profile I found in a culture magazine from two years ago, never once seemed troubled by the family’s bafflement at this decision.
His photograph showed a man comfortable being looked at in a way that went beyond beauty into something more specific, the ease of someone who understood his effect on a room and had made his peace with it.
Knox Castellan, thirty-nine, who had spent his twenties and early thirties as a professional motorsport driver with three national championship titles before transitioning to ownership of a racing team he had built from the ground up.
He grinned in his photographs in a way that none of the other brothers did, with the full, unguarded quality of a man who had spent most of his adult life doing something that frightened people and found this quietly hilarious.
Theo Castellan, thirty-six, the reclusive one, whose name appeared consistently in industry profiles about the Castellan Holdings technology division but whose photograph was so rarely published that the most recent one I could find was four years old.
The article that contained it described him as the family’s secret weapon, which he had reportedly refused to comment on.
Felix Castellan, thirty-three, who appeared to have no specific professional designation that the press could reliably agree on but who appeared in society photographs with enough regularity and charm to generate his own steady current of coverage regardless.
He was, according to three separate profiles, “the one who knows everyone,” a description he seemed to find very funny.
Milo Castellan, twenty-nine, the youngest, who was completing a fellowship in international trade law and who the press had largely left alone in the protective shadow of the older five.
Six of them. The Castellan boys, Solenne’s papers called them, with the particular collective warmth the public reserves for wealthy families who have the decency to also be photogenic.
Atticus and Julian and Knox and Theo and Felix and Milo, arranged in a family portrait from a charity gala five years ago, the kind of photograph that makes ordinary people feel the particular, unspecific longing of imagining what it might be like to belong to something that solid.
I stared at that photograph for a long time, longer than was strictly rational, looking for something in any of their faces that might reflect something in mine. I didn’t find it. But then I hadn’t expected to. Families weren’t mirrors. Belonging wasn’t visible from the outside.
* * *
Vale called at eleven forty-three on the third morning. I was at the hotel desk with a cup of mediocre coffee and my laptop open to a spreadsheet I’d been pretending to work on for two hours, something to do with job listings that I’d been looking at without seeing.
“Can you come in?” he said, without preamble. “This afternoon if possible.”
Something in the brevity of it told me I wanted to be sitting down when I heard the rest. “I can come now,” I said.
He didn’t object.
* * *
The folder Vale put on the desk between us was not thick.
The truth, in my experience, rarely required as much paper as the lies built to cover it did.
A few pages, clipped together with a precision that suggested he had organized them in the order he intended me to read them. He sat back and let me begin.
The first page was a copy of my birth certificate — not the one I’d grown up with, not the one that said Larkin in the parents’ field and had been framed in the study beside the adoption certificate.
This was the original filing, retrieved from a sealed county record that Vale had accessed through channels he didn’t specify and that I chose not to ask about.
The parents’ names on this certificate were Magnus Aldric Castellan and Elena Marie Castellan, née Voss.
The child’s given name was Wren Adeline Castellan.
I read that three times. My name, my actual name, the one I’d answered to for twenty-two years, looking back at me from a document I’d never been allowed to see, bracketed by a surname that meant something to every living person in this country.
I had always been Wren. I had simply never been allowed to know who Wren was.
The second page was a DNA comparison report, the methodology explained in terms that were precise without being technical, comparing markers from my sample against the university hospital’s record.
The report was two pages long. The conclusion was one sentence, printed at the bottom of the second page in the same unremarkable font as everything else above it, as though it were routine, as though sentences like this one arrived in the world every day without splitting anything open:
Probability of biological paternity: 99.97%. The subject is the biological daughter of Magnus Aldric Castellan.
I became aware that I had stopped breathing and corrected this.
The third page was Vale’s notes, handwritten in small, slanted script.
He had found the record of the placement — a private arrangement brokered through a law firm that no longer existed, executed when I was four months old.
The Larkins had been paid. Not a small amount.
The figure he’d written was specific enough that I understood it had been important, important enough that Walter and Diane had kept the secret for twenty-two years without any apparent crisis of conscience.
The fourth page was a photograph. Magnus and Elena Castellan at what appeared to be a private event, undated, standing together in the way long-married people stand, the adjustment to each other’s presence automatic and unconscious.
Elena Castellan was tall and fair, with the kind of bone structure that aged cleanly.
Her eyes, in the photograph, were the particular shade of grey that I had always understood to be simply the color of my own eyes, unremarkable, not worth commenting on.
Her eyes were my eyes exactly.
I set the photograph down with both hands because my hands were not entirely steady.
“The family has never stopped looking for you,” Vale said, quietly, in the voice of a man who deals in difficult information and has learned to deliver it without embellishment.
“There have been three private investigations since 2009, each commissioned by Magnus Castellan personally. The most recent was closed eight months ago, the trail having gone cold. The attorney who brokered the placement died in 2014. The intermediary firm dissolved in 2007. You were, from the official record’s perspective, very thoroughly hidden. ”
“Who hid me?” I asked, and my voice came out almost normal, which surprised me.
Vale hesitated, the first hesitation I’d seen from him. “That I don’t know yet. Someone with enough reach to seal a county birth record and enough motive to keep it sealed for twenty-two years. That isn’t a small operation. It isn’t something the Larkins could have arranged alone.”
I looked back down at the photograph. At the grey eyes I’d inherited from a woman I’d never met, who had spent over two decades trying to find me.
Diane’s voice circled back without invitation, patient and precise as a blade: go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.
I had gone back. I was there.
“What do I do now?” I asked, though even as I asked it I understood that Vale was the wrong person to answer this question, that the answer was not something an investigator could hand me in a folder.
It was mine to carry, the way everything consequential had always been mine to carry, alone, without a map, without anyone waiting on the other side to tell me I’d read the territory correctly.
Vale refilled his coffee from a thermos on the desk.
“You could contact the family directly,” he said.
“I can provide a secure channel if you don’t want to appear at the door of Castellan Holdings and announce yourself.
Or you can take time. There’s no deadline on this.
The information will still be true next week. ”
I folded my hands in my lap the way Diane had taught me, the posture of composure that I had worn so long it had started to feel like skin. Then, deliberately, I unfolded them, and set them flat on my thighs, and let them simply be my hands, not arranged, not performing anything.
“I’ll contact them myself,” I said. “Don’t send anything on my behalf. I want to do it in person.”
“Are you sure?” he said. “A man like Magnus Castellan doesn’t just take walk-in appointments.”
I picked up the birth certificate. My name, in print, on official paper, that no one had ever thought to show me. Wren Adeline Castellan. Twenty-two years old. Daughter of Magnus Castellan, the richest man in Solenne.
“No,” I agreed, and stood, and tucked the folder under my arm with a steadiness that cost me something I didn’t have a name for yet. “But I’m not a walk-in.”