The heiress he never met

Chapter 2

The text came at 7:14 the next morning, while Wren was still wearing Isabella's silk robe in Isabella's hotel suite, staring at a ceiling that cost more per square foot than her entire apartment. One line, no punctuation, sent from a number she didn't recognize.

Something came up. Stay put. I'll explain everything.

She read it four times before she understood that it wasn't a delay, it was an instruction.

She called the number back immediately and got a recorded message informing her the line was no longer in service, which seemed, even to someone with no experience in the particular criminal art of disappearing, like a thing a person arranged in advance rather than discovered by accident. She sat on the edge of a bed the size of her studio apartment and felt the floor of the last twelve hours give way beneath her in slow motion.

Forty-eight hours, Isabella had said. It had been eleven.

Wren got up and went looking for her own phone, the cracked one with the dying battery, buried at the bottom of a garment bag she'd been told to leave behind for the staff to handle. She found it wedged in an inside pocket along with the clothes she'd actually arrived in — jeans, a paint-stained sweater, the unglamorous evidence of the person she'd been twenty-four hours ago and she held it like a lifeline while it took its time booting up.

No messages from Isabella, no missed calls. Just a voicemail from her landlord about a leak in 4B that wasn't her problem, and a calendar reminder for a restoration job at the Whitfield estate that she was, as of this exact moment, going to miss for the second day running, with no way to explain why that wouldn't sound insane.

There was a knock at the door, Wren froze the way a person freezes when they have, for the first time in their life, something to actually be afraid of getting caught doing.

"Ms. Ashworth?" A woman's voice, brisk and unbothered, the voice of someone whose entire job was anticipating other people's needs before they had to ask. "I have your morning schedule whenever you're ready. Mr. Vale's office also asked me to confirm lunch."

Ms. Ashworth,Wren stood very still in a stranger's robe and understood, with the particular clarity that arrives in the worst moments of a person's life, that there was no script for this. Isabella hadn't given her one. There had been no contingency plan handed over with the envelope of cash, no instructions for what to do if forty-eight hours became something else entirely. There had only been the dress, the car, and a sister's voice saying I promise he won't know, which had already, within a single evening, turned out to be a lie.

"Give me ten minutes," Wren said, through the door, in a voice that came out steadier than she felt.

She thought, briefly and with something close to hysteria, about simply opening the door and telling the woman the truth. My name is Wren Calloway. I'm not Isabella Ashworth, my sister asked me to pretend to be her for one night and then she vanished and I have no idea what to do, and also I think the man I spent four hours standing next to last night already suspects something is wrong, and also I have eleven dollars in my actual checking account and a restoration job I'm going to lose if I don't show up today. She thought about how that sentence would sound to anyone who hadn't lived inside the last twelve hours, and understood immediately that it would sound, to literally anyone, like the words of someone who needed to be removed from this hotel suite and possibly placed under psychiatric observation.

So she didn't say it, she showered in a bathroom with five different kinds of soap she didn't recognize, none of them anything she could afford, and she put on a stranger's clothes from a closet that had apparently been stocked for this exact eventuality, and she went out to find the day already arranged for her by people who had no idea they were arranging it for the wrong woman.

The lawyer arrived at ten, his name was Preston Hale, and he had the particular flatness of voice that Wren would come to recognize, over the following weeks, as the native dialect of men who got paid extraordinary amounts of money to make problems disappear quietly.

"Mr. Vale's office has asked me to coordinate with you directly on the press timeline," he said, setting a folder on the table between them without sitting down first, the gesture of a man establishing that this was business and not a conversation between equals. "We need to discuss the engagement announcement that ran this morning. There's a photograph circulating that's gotten more traction than anticipated."

He turned a tablet toward her, the photograph was the one from last night — Sebastian's hand at the small of her back, her face turned slightly toward him, both of them caught mid-laugh at something neither of them, Wren now recalled with a small, sick jolt, had actually found funny. The headline beneath it used the word smitten. The caption used Isabella's full name.

"Isabella's been unreachable since last night," Wren said, choosing the careful third person, watching to see if it landed wrong. "I'm not sure what she'd want me to say about the timeline."

Preston's expression didn't change, which told Wren more than anything he could have said out loud. "Ms. Ashworth's communication patterns have been unpredictable lately. We're aware. Mr. Vale's office has asked that the engagement proceed publicly as planned regardless, given the board vote in six weeks. Any appearance of instability right now would be — " he paused, choosing a word with visible care — "costly. For everyone."

For everyone, not for Isabella. Not for Sebastian. For everyone, which Wren understood to mean for the company, for the deal, for whatever machine this engagement had always been built to serve, with Isabella as one replaceable part of it and Wren, apparently, as the spare.

"What exactly are you asking me to do," Wren said.

"Continue as planned. There's a dinner Thursday with the Hartwell Group, board members who'll be evaluating Mr. Vale's readiness for the transition. Your presence has been specifically requested." Preston closed the folder. "I understand this is an unusual situation, given Isabella's absence. I'd ask that you not discuss the particulars of that absence with anyone outside this room. The Ashworth family has its reasons for discretion, and I imagine you understand the value of keeping a confidence."

It took Wren a moment to realize what he'd actually said, buried so carefully inside the bureaucratic phrasing that she'd nearly missed it. He knew, not everything — she didn't think he knew she wasn't Isabella at all but he knew Isabella was gone in a way that wasn't ordinary, and he was choosing, with the same flat efficiency he brought to everything else, to manage it rather than question it.

"And if I say no," Wren said. "If I walk out of this hotel right now and don't go to your dinner Thursday."

For the first time, something flickered behind Preston's professional composure not anger, something closer to genuine confusion, as if the question itself had never occurred to him as a live possibility. "Then I imagine Mr. Vale's office would need to understand why, and the situation would become considerably more complicated for the Ashworth family than it currently is." He paused. "I was told you understood the stakes of this arrangement. Was I told wrong?"

Wren thought of Isabella's hands shaking on the workbench, the envelope she hadn't fully counted before tucking it into her bag, the number that had gone dead overnight. She thought of the restoration job she'd already lost and the next one she'd probably lose too, and the version of her life that had been waiting for her before yesterday, narrow and exhausting and entirely her own. She thought, with a clarity that surprised her, that she had no idea anymore which version of staying was actually protecting her sister and which was simply the path of least immediate disaster.

"No," she said. "You weren't told wrong."

She found Sebastian's office, eventually, on the forty-first floor of a building made almost entirely of glass, having been escorted there by an assistant who clearly believed she already knew the way and was too polite to ask why she didn't. Wren had told herself, riding up in the elevator with her stomach in her throat, that she wasn't going to confront him. She was going to observe him. Gather information, figure out, quietly, how much danger she was actually in before deciding what to do about it.

He was on a call when she arrived, standing at the window with his back to the door, one hand braced against the glass, and something in the line of his shoulders made Wren stop in the doorway instead of announcing herself. He wasn't performing for anyone right now. There was no room full of cameras, no fiancée to angle himself toward. He looked, for just a moment, like a man holding something together by sheer force of posture, and Wren felt an unwelcome twist of recognition, because she knew exactly what that particular kind of standing-up-straight cost a person.

Then he turned, saw her, and the posture resolved itself instantly back into the version of him from the gala — controlled, unreadable, already cataloguing.

"That's all for now," he said into the phone, and ended the call without waiting for a response. "You came up here yourself. Isabella never does that. She has people for buildings like this one."

"Maybe I wanted to see where you work."

"Maybe." He studied her the way he had at the gala, that same patient, exacting attention, and Wren made herself hold still under it instead of fidgeting with the ring she still hadn't gotten used to wearing. "Preston tell you about Thursday."

"He told me a lot of things."

"And you're still here." Sebastian crossed the room slowly, hands in his pockets, every movement deliberate in a way that made Wren intensely aware of her own. "I find that interesting. A woman in your position, whoever you actually are usually wants to be as far from all this as possible, not standing in my office at noon asking questions she already half knows the answers to."

There it was again — the same quiet, surgical precision from the gala, dropped into a sentence so casually that for a moment Wren almost let it pass without reacting, the way you let a paper cut pass before the sting catches up to you.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"I think you do." He stopped a few feet away, close enough that she had to tilt her chin up slightly to keep meeting his eyes, and there was nothing aggressive in his stance, nothing that should have made her pulse climb the way it did — only that same terrible attentiveness, like he'd already decided she was worth the effort of being studied properly. "I'm not going to ask you who you are. Not yet, I have my own reasons for needing this engagement to survive the next six weeks intact, and as far as I can tell, you have your own reasons for needing the same thing. So we have an arrangement, whether either of us said the words out loud or not."

"And if I don't want an arrangement with you."

"Then you'll tell Preston the truth, and we'll both deal with the consequences of that." Something shifted in his expression, almost imperceptibly not softness, exactly, but a kind of weary honesty that hadn't been in the room a moment ago. "I don't think you want to do that. I think whatever reason you have for being here is bigger than a dinner on Thursday."

He was right, which was the worst part, Wren stood in a glass office opposite a man who'd seen through her in under twenty-four hours and decided, for reasons she couldn't yet name, to let the lie stand anyway, and she understood that she had just made the kind of bargain people didn't get to walk back from cleanly.

"Thursday," she said. "Fine."

Sebastian nodded once, like a transaction had been confirmed, and turned back toward the window, dismissing her with nothing but the angle of his shoulders. Wren made it almost to the door before his voice stopped her.

"For what it's worth," he said, not turning around, "you're a better liar than she is. I'd be careful what you do with that."

Wren left without answering, because she didn't trust herself to find the right one, and rode the elevator down forty-one floors with her own reflection in the glass refusing, the entire way, to look like a stranger anymore.