Dr. Okafor's research assistant, a methodical graduate student named Priya Fitzgerald whom Wren had come to appreciate for her willingness to spend entire afternoons tracing genealogical records without complaint, found the first thread to the wider Calloway family in a set of census records from 1970, cross-referenced against a Social Security death index that traced two of Elias Calloway's grandchildren, beyond the line that led to Wren and Isabella's grandmother, to a small city in Ohio neither Wren nor Isabella had ever had reason to visit.
"There's a woman named Ruth Calloway Dembski," Priya reported, laying out a printed family tree across the archive's reading table with the particular satisfaction of a researcher who had solved a puzzle nobody else had thought to attempt. "Seventy
