Chapter 8
WREN
By the time Knox arrived, I had met four of my brothers and developed a working theory about the Castellan family: they were each, in their own idiom, entirely themselves, and they had no apparent interest in being otherwise.
This sounds unremarkable until you have spent twenty-two years in a household where being yourself was something you did quietly and in private, where the family’s public face was a garment everyone was expected to wear without pulling at the collar.
Atticus was controlled precision. Julian was warmth that moved at speed.
Theo, who had arrived mid-afternoon in a car he was driving himself with no advance notice and no explanation, had shaken my hand, looked at me for a long moment with the assessing stillness of someone running a complex calculation, and said: “Good. You’re here.
” Then he’d gone to find coffee and a quiet room with an ethernet connection.
Felix had called from a car also mid-afternoon and talked for six continuous minutes without appearing to require input from the other end of the phone, covering the subjects of his flight, the news coverage, three separate people he had already spoken to on my behalf without asking my permission, and his sincere opinion that the Larkin Foundation’s midnight statement was the most comprehensively self-defeating document he’d read in years.
“From a communications standpoint,” he’d added, with the thoughtful precision of a man who has opinions about communications standpoints.
“Pure gift, honestly. We couldn’t have written it better ourselves. ”
Milo I had not yet met in person. He had called that morning, after Elena, and the voice on the phone had been younger than I expected from someone who was twenty-nine, or perhaps not younger so much as less performed than the others, less certain of the room’s response before he opened his mouth.
He had said hello, and then: “I don’t know what the right thing to say is.
I’ve been trying to figure it out for two hours.
” A pause. “Is it okay if I just say I’m glad you’re there? ”
I had told him it was more than okay. He’d said he would be on the estate by evening.
Knox landed at half past six.
* * *
He came in through the front door the way someone comes in who has spent years arriving places where people are pleased to see him and has learned to receive it without making a production of it.
He was built differently from Atticus and Julian — broader through the shoulders, with the unhurried physical ease of a man who trusts his body absolutely, who has spent enough years at high speed in enclosed spaces that stillness is a thing he wears lightly and velocity is simply home.
He stopped when he saw me. He had the same grin as his photographs, wide and unguarded, the grin of someone who has found something genuinely funny about the world and keeps finding it, and it arrived on his face now without calculation, a reflex.
“There she is,” he said, which was the same thing Magnus had said in the front hall the previous day, and I understood it was a family sentence, a thing that had been said in the dark for twenty-two years as a hypothetical and was now being said to an actual person, and that neither of them had planned to say it.
That it had simply been the thing that came.
He hugged me the way Julian had not — Julian’s had been hands, a held grip, the confirmation of solidity.
Knox’s was the full, uncomplicated embrace of someone who is comfortable in the physical world and expresses feeling through it without overthinking.
He was warm and he smelled like an airport and he held on for a moment that was neither too short nor too long but was, I found, exactly right.
“You cost me a championship,” he said, pulling back but keeping both hands on my shoulders, still grinning. “I want you to know that. I need it on the record.”
“I didn’t ask you to withdraw,” I said.
“No, but you existed, which had the same effect.” He dropped his hands and looked at me with something underneath the grin that was quieter and more serious than the surface of it.
“Are you all right?” The same question Atticus had asked on the phone.
The family question, I was realising. The one they led with.
“I am considerably more all right than I was four days ago,” I said.
Knox nodded, once, with the satisfied efficiency of a man filing a status report. “Good enough for now.” He released me and looked around the hall. “Where’s Felix? I heard he’s already given three interviews on your behalf without telling anyone.”
“Two,” said Felix, appearing from the direction of the kitchen with a glass of wine and the serenity of a man who does not recognise the distinction between two and three as meaningful. “And they weren’t interviews, they were conversations. There is a difference.”
“There really isn’t,” Atticus said from the staircase, without looking up from his phone.
* * *
Dinner that night was the largest meal the estate kitchen had produced in what the housekeeper, Mrs. Farran, informed me was at least three years, which was the last time all six brothers had been in the same place simultaneously.
She said this with the satisfaction of a woman whose professional capabilities had been waiting for exactly this kind of occasion, and produced from the kitchen a succession of dishes that suggested she had been planning this menu in her head for some time and was not going to waste the opportunity.
We were nine at the table. Magnus at the head.
Elena to his right. Then me, then Milo, who had arrived forty minutes before dinner looking slightly wind-blown and had taken the chair beside mine with a quiet intentionality that I recognised as the youngest-sibling instinct to establish proximity before the older ones filled all the available space.
Across from us: Felix, Julian, Knox. Theo at the far end, with a notepad beside his plate that he wrote in periodically without explaining why and that no one appeared to find unusual.
Atticus to Magnus’s left, with his phone face-down on the table in front of him, which was apparently his version of being present.
The conversation moved the way conversation does in a family that has been talking to each other for decades — not linearly, not politely, but in overlapping currents, one thread picked up before another finished, references to shared history that I could not follow but could hear the texture of, the dense specific shorthand of people who have grown up in the same rooms.
I watched more than I spoke, at first. This was habitual — I had spent twenty-two years in a household where speaking without full situational awareness was a liability.
But I was also, if I was honest with myself, simply enjoying it.
The noise of it. The way Felix could redirect a conversation with a single well-placed sentence.
The way Knox and Julian argued about something that had apparently happened at a family event seven years ago with the absolute conviction of two people who are each certain they are right and have accepted that this is not a problem that will be resolved tonight.
The way Milo, beside me, refilled my water glass without my asking, the small automatic gesture of someone who pays attention to what the people near him need.
“What do you like to do?” Milo asked, low enough that it was a question for me rather than the table. He had waited, I noticed, for a lull in the larger conversation. “When it’s just you. What do you do with it?”
I thought about it. “I cook,” I said. “Not ambitiously. But I find it settles me. The sequence of it.”
He nodded like this made complete sense. “I run,” he said. “Same reason. Something with a clear start and end that behaves the way you tell it to.” He glanced at me sidelong. “We have a good kitchen here. Mrs. Farran will pretend to be territorial about it but she won’t actually stop you.”
Across the table, Knox was pointing at Julian with his fork to emphasise a point Julian was ignoring with practised ease.
Felix had one ear on their argument and one eye on his phone in his lap, monitoring something with the discreet, habitual attention of a man who never entirely stops managing information flows even at dinner.
Magnus was telling Atticus something in a low voice, and Atticus was listening with the full quality of attention he brought to everything, pen absolutely still in his hand, not writing, not glancing elsewhere.
Elena caught my eye from across the table and something in her face did the thing it kept doing — the involuntary, unmanaged quality of looking at something she had been afraid she would never see.
I had learned, in the last twenty-four hours, to receive this without looking away from it. She had earned the looking.
* * *
It was Felix who saw the alert first, because Felix, even at dinner, was monitoring three feeds with the portion of his attention he wasn’t using for the conversation.
He set his phone on the table without theatrics. “The Larkins are doing a press conference,” he said, into a lull that happened to contain everyone’s attention simultaneously. “Live. Right now.”
The table went briefly still in the specific way of eight people making individual decisions about how to respond to a piece of information before anyone speaks.
“Put it on,” Knox said.
Felix cast it to the screen at the end of the dining room, which Mrs. Farran had left down for exactly this kind of occasion, and Walter Larkin’s face appeared at a podium that had been set up in what I recognized as the Larkin Foundation boardroom.
He was wearing the dark suit he wore when he wanted to project gravitas rather than authority, a distinction I had learned to read early and which told me immediately that this had been staged with care.