The doubt arrived, as these things often do, not through any single dramatic event but through the slow accumulation of small moments Wren hadn't fully noticed piling up until they became impossible to ignore.
It started, she thought later, with the seating chart for a charity dinner in early March — a minor administrative detail, the kind of thing Preston's office handled without consulting her directly, except that this particular chart listed her, for the first time in any official capacity, as Wren Calloway-Vale, a hyphenated name nobody had actually discussed with her, applied by an assistant who had simply assumed, reasonably enough, that the future belonged to a version of her name that folded neatly into the family's existing conventions.
"It's not a real decision," Sebastian sai
