Chapter 7
WREN
The room was the colour of early morning even in the dark — pale walls, pale linen, a window that faced east with curtains thin enough that the first light found me before the alarm I hadn’t set could have.
I lay there in the grey-white quiet and looked at the ceiling and took inventory of the fact that I had slept, which surprised me, and slept without dreaming, which surprised me more.
The room itself was a thing I was still arriving at.
I had stood in the doorway the previous night while Elena explained, without any of the performing quality I’d expected, that they had simply kept it ready — repainted once, the furniture updated when the crib became impractical, but otherwise held, the way you hold a table at a restaurant for someone whose train is delayed and whose arrival time you cannot confirm but whose seat you will not give away regardless.
The bookshelf held books chosen by a woman who had spent twenty-two years imagining what her daughter might like to read.
The lamp on the nightstand was the particular shade of warm gold that suggested someone had thought about the quality of light a person wakes up to.
I had not cried looking at it. I had stood in the doorway for a long moment and then I had walked in and sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my hand flat on the quilt the way you press your hand on something to confirm it is real, and then I had lain down in my clothes and been asleep within minutes, which was, I recognized, either evidence of exhaustion or of a body finally understanding it was somewhere it did not have to be vigilant.
* * *
Elena knocked at half past seven. She opened the door when I called out and came in with two mugs of coffee, handing me one and taking the chair by the window with the ease of a woman who is trying very hard not to make the moment larger than I need it to be, which meant she understood exactly how large it was.
We talked for an hour. Not about the placement, not about Crewe or the sealed records or the twenty-two years — there was time for all of that, the specific, grinding time of people who are only beginning to understand how much history they have to excavate together.
We talked about smaller things. She asked what I had studied.
I told her. She asked what I was good at.
I thought about it and said: managing systems that other people find chaotic, which made her smile in a way that went sideways and private, the smile of a woman recognizing something.
“Your grandfather,” she said. “Magnus’s father. He used to say the same thing about himself. Exactly that. That disorder was simply a pattern he hadn’t charted yet.”
She said it the way people offer a gift they are not sure will be received, watching my face to see how it landed.
I held the mug with both hands and felt the warmth of it move through my palms and said: “Tell me about him.” And she did.
* * *
Julian arrived at eleven.
I heard him before I saw him — a voice in the front hall that carried the way certain voices do, not because they are loud but because they are practiced, calibrated over years to fill whatever space they enter without appearing to try.
He was saying something that made the housekeeper laugh, which told me the making-people-laugh was also a practice, also calibrated, also so smooth by now it looked effortless.
Then he came through the sitting room door and stopped.
Julian Castellan was not the most conventionally handsome of the brothers in the photographs — that was probably Knox, with the grin and the easy symmetry of someone who spent his life outdoors and didn’t think about it.
Julian was something different. He was the kind of handsome that required you to look twice not because the first look missed anything but because the first look didn’t fully account for what the eyes were doing underneath the everything else.
They were quick and warm and, at this particular moment, doing something I had not expected from a man I’d seen photographed at film premieres and charity events and on the covers of two separate culture magazines.
They were filling up.
He crossed the room in four strides and took both my hands in his before I had processed that he was close enough to reach me, and held them the way you hold something you are confirming is solid rather than greeting a person you have just met.
“You look like Mum when she was young,” he said.
“I have a photograph of her at twenty-two. It’s almost —” He stopped.
He was not, I was realising, a man who often ran out of words, which meant the running out of them now was not a performance.
He cleared his throat. Tried again. “Hello, Wren. I’m Julian.
I cancelled a film premiere to be here, which I want you to know not so that you feel obligated but so that you understand I don’t do that for people I’m not absolutely certain about. ”
I looked at him — at the warm quick eyes and the hands still holding mine and the entirely unguarded quality of a man who has decided, in the space of crossing a room, that there is no point pretending we are strangers when we are not. “How long was the flight?” I asked.
“Eight hours. I slept for four and spent the other four reading everything I could find on the Larkin family, which is why,” he said, “you should know that I have opinions I am restraining out of respect for the fact that we’ve known each other for approximately ninety seconds.”
“You can stop restraining them,” I said. “I have some of my own.”
Julian’s mouth curved, slow and warm. “I think,” he said, releasing my hands and dropping onto the sofa beside me with the comfortable ease of a person who has been in this room a thousand times, “we are going to get along very well.”
* * *
Atticus found us at noon. He came into the sitting room with his phone in his hand and the particular set to his jaw that I was already beginning to recognize as his version of controlled urgency — the look of a man moving at full speed behind a composed face.
“Knox called,” he said, to both of us, or perhaps to the room. “He’s withdrawn from the championship final.”
Julian put down his coffee. “The race is tomorrow.”
“I know when the race is.”
“Atticus. He’s been qualifying for that final for two years.”
“I know that too.” Atticus looked at me. “He asked me to tell you — and I’m delivering the message exactly as he gave it to me, which means what you hear is his decision and not mine — that championships happen every year and sisters don’t.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Julian watched me with the expression of a man who finds the moment affecting and is not going to pretend otherwise.
“He can’t do that,” I said.
“He’s already done it,” Atticus said, without inflection.
“The team released a statement an hour ago citing personal reasons. Which brings me to the other thing.” He set his phone on the table in front of me, screen up, facing me.
“Read this. It goes out in forty minutes unless you want to change it.”
I looked at the screen.
* * *
The statement was from the Castellan family office. It was formal in the way of documents written by people who understand that measured language hits harder than heated language, and it was six paragraphs long.
The first paragraph confirmed that after twenty-two years and three private investigations, the Castellan family had located their youngest child and daughter, Wren Adeline Castellan, who had been placed in a private arrangement as an infant under circumstances that were currently the subject of a thorough legal review.
The second paragraph stated that Wren Castellan had been, until recently, living under the name Wren Larkin, a situation the family characterized as one she had been kept from understanding through no fault of her own.
The third paragraph noted that during this period, Wren had been subjected to a public defamation campaign and had been formally disowned by the Larkin family in a foundation statement that the Castellan legal team was now examining for potential action.
The fourth paragraph was the one I read twice.
It said: The Castellan family wishes to make unambiguously clear that Wren Castellan is, and has always been, a full and beloved member of this family.
Any individual or institution that participated in the campaign against her, including the dissemination of fabricated professional misconduct, is advised to seek legal counsel.
The fifth paragraph thanked the public for respecting the family’s privacy during a period of private reunion.
The sixth paragraph had no words. It was a family photograph.
Not staged, not professional — the sitting room where I was currently sitting, the sofa I was currently on, taken sometime in the last twelve hours by someone with a steady hand and a very good eye for available light.
Magnus and Elena on either side of me. Atticus standing behind, one hand on the back of the sofa.
Julian beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched.
It looked, and I understood with a slow, gathering certainty that this was entirely intentional, like a family that had been complete for twenty-two years and was simply, finally, all in the same room.
I looked up at Atticus. “When did you take this?”
“Last night. After dinner. You were talking to Mum.” He met my gaze steadily. “Do you want it removed?”
I looked at the photograph again. At my own face in it, which looked nothing like the face I’d been wearing for the last four days — not composed, not performing anything, simply present, lit warm by the lamp Elena had chosen for the quality of the light.
“Send it,” I said.
* * *
brIELLE
I was at the dining table with my laptop open to three different browser tabs when it hit.