"You already know I'm not Isabella," Wren said. "I know you've known for months. What you don't know is what I found in the basement archive, and I need to tell you all of it, in order, because I don't think you'll believe the end of it if I don't."
She told him about the search on her first night in this house, staring at a portrait that had reached for a memory she didn't have words for. She told him about the newspaper clipping, the patent dispute settled out of court in 1962, a name she recognized because it was her own. She told him about the misfiled box in the archive, the ten letters between Augustus Vale and a man who signed himself E.C., the careful, trusting warmth in the early ones and the quiet, formal note in the last, dated four months before whatever had happened to break
