The Gate

Wren didn't remember standing. One second she was gripping the phone, the next she had her coat off the hook by the door and her clinic badge ripped from her lapel, thrown onto the desk like it belonged to someone else's life.

"I have a jet at the airport," Sebastian said, already moving, already ahead of her in the hallway in a way that made something old and furious rise up in her chest, because of course he did, of course a Castellano's answer to a crisis was a private runway and forty minutes shaved off a commercial flight. "Forty minutes to Lisbon from wheels up. Wren, let me help you."

"I don't need your jet." She was already dialing Marisol back, phone jammed against her ear, walking fast enough that Priya looked up from the front desk with open alarm. "I need your mother nowhere near my son."

"She's already near him," Sebastian said, low and urgent, keeping pace with her through the waiting room, past a patient who watched them go with wide eyes. "She is standing outside his school right now, Wren, and you can be furious with me for the rest of your life, you can hate every Castellano who ever drew breath, but right now the fastest way to get to him is the plane, and you know it."

She hated that he was right. She hated it with the specific, bitter clarity of a woman who had spent four years building a life designed to never again need anything from this man, and here she was, forty seconds into seeing him again, already needing exactly the thing he had.

"Fine," she bit out. "But I'm calling the school's security myself. And you're not going anywhere near Theo until I say so."

"Understood."

The line clicked through to Marisol before Wren reached the parking garage. "Talk to me," Wren said, breathless, already running.

"She's gone." Marisol's voice was shaking. "The woman left about two minutes ago, got into a black car, didn't try to come past the gate again. But Wren, she knew things. She knew his birthday. She had a photo of him from last month, from the park, I don't know how she got that close without either of us seeing her."

"Is Theo okay? Did he see her?"

"He's fine, he's inside with the other kids, he has no idea anything happened. I didn't let him near the gate."

Relief hit Wren so hard her knees nearly buckled against the parking garage's concrete pillar. She pressed her forehead to the cool stone for half a second, just breathing, while Sebastian stood a careful few feet away, watching her with an expression she didn't have the bandwidth to interpret.

"Don't let him out of your sight," Wren said into the phone. "I'm coming. I'll be there tonight."

She hung up and turned to find Sebastian already on his own phone, voice clipped and businesslike in a way she remembered from a hundred dinner parties, the sound of him handling a problem before it became a bigger one.

"—I don't care what she told you, Renata, you tell my mother's driver that if that car comes within a mile of that school again I will have the family's Lisbon accounts frozen by morning, and she knows I have the authority to do it." A pause. "Good. Call me the second she's back at the estate."

He hung up and looked at Wren, and for the first time since he'd walked into her consultation room, the composure had fully dropped away. What was left underneath looked almost like the boy she'd first married, before she understood what the polish was hiding.

"My mother has had someone watching you," he said. "Possibly for longer than I've known. I didn't authorize this. I need you to believe that, even if you don't believe anything else I say today."

"I don't care whose idea it was." Wren was already moving again, toward the elevator, toward the garage, toward anything that would get her closer to Lisbon faster. "I care that a woman my son has never met knows his birthday. I care that she was close enough to photograph him at a park and neither Marisol nor I noticed. That's not a mother's love, Sebastian, that's surveillance, and I want to know exactly how long it's been happening."

"So do I." His jaw was tight, a muscle working there she'd forgotten she used to find fascinating, before she learned to be suspicious of every calm surface on him. "Which is another reason you need me on that plane. I have access to things you don't. Accounts. Staff records. My mother's calendar for the last five years. If she's been tracking you since before Theo was born, I can find the trail faster than any investigator you could hire on your own, because I know exactly where the bodies are buried in that family, Wren. I grew up burying them."

The elevator doors opened. Wren stepped in. After a beat of hesitation that felt like it cost her something, she held the door instead of letting it close on him.

"You get on that plane," she said, "and you help me find out what she knows, and you do not go near my son. Not tonight. Not until I decide otherwise."

"Agreed."

"And Sebastian." She looked at him, and let herself, just for one unguarded second, feel the full weight of the last five years, the fear and the exhaustion and the specific loneliness of raising a child alone in a country where she'd had to invent her entire name from scratch. "If I find out you knew about the surveillance and let it happen anyway, there will not be a plane fast enough to get you away from what I do next."

He didn't flinch. If anything, something in his expression sharpened with what looked almost like respect.

"Noted," he said.

The elevator doors closed. Forty minutes later they were airborne, the lights of Geneva shrinking beneath them, both of them silent, both of them staring at their phones, waiting for word from Lisbon.

Wren's phone buzzed at the exact moment the plane leveled off.

Not Marisol this time. An unknown number, a Lisbon area code.

She opened the message with her heart already climbing into her throat, and the words on the screen turned her blood to ice.

*Dr. Calloway. My name is Delia Castellano. We haven't formally met, but I feel I know you well by now. Your son has his father's smile. I do hope we can discuss his future like civilized women, before anyone has to involve lawyers. I'll be at your flat when you land.*