chapter three

The Girl With Her Face

The car that came for her was the black sedan. Wren recognized it the moment the driver opened the door, and she got in anyway, because there was a small duffel bag on her lap, an unpaid bill in her chest, and nothing left to protect but a woman asleep in a hospital bed.

For the first hour nobody spoke. The driver kept his eyes on the road, and Margaret and Charles had taken a second car, so that Wren sat alone in the back with the smell of leather and the sense of being delivered. She watched the town thin out into fields, then highway, then strip malls and glass buildings she had only seen on television. At a red light she pulled out her phone and typed a message to the nurses’ station: Please tell Edna I’ll visit Sunday. Please tell her I love her. Her thumb hovered over the send button for a long time before she pressed it, because it felt like a goodbye.

The drive took two hours and ended somewhere the roads were wider and the lawns looked combed. Iron gates swung open without anyone touching them. At the end of a long drive stood the Ashworth house, white stone and tall windows, lit up like a ship at sea.

The staircase inside curved like something in a film. Wren stood at the bottom of it holding her one duffel bag and felt like a stain on the marble. A housekeeper in a gray uniform took her jacket with the faint disapproval of someone handling a stray cat, and Margaret’s heels clicked away across the floor, announcing that Wren should wait.

A door opened on the landing above her, and a girl came out.

It was like seeing a photograph of yourself that someone had retouched. The same face, the same dark-gold hair, the same eyes. But this girl’s hair fell in glossy waves that had clearly never been tied back under a diner visor. Her nails were perfect. She wore a silk robe the color of champagne, and she looked down at Wren with an expression of complete, delighted contempt.

“Well,” said Seraphina Ashworth. “They weren’t lying. She actually looks like me.”

Wren’s mouth had gone dry. Somewhere in her mind a calm voice noted that she was being looked at the way you look at a purchase, again, and that this time the buyer was her own face.

Up close, the resemblance was almost cruel. The same arch of brow, the same tiny crescent-shaped birthmark beneath the left ear, though Sera’s had been carefully dusted away with powder, as if even that small imperfection were an inconvenience. Wren had spent her whole life believing that mark was hers alone.

“Sera,” Margaret said sharply, returning from the hallway, and Wren noticed that her voice was soft with this girl in a way it had never been with her. “Be kind.”

“I am being kind. I’m not saying she looks good.” Sera came down the stairs slowly, circling Wren. She smelled like jasmine and money. “Hm. The hair is the wrong length. The skin is rough. The posture is dreadful. But from a distance, in the right dress...” She smiled. “Yes. This will work.”

“What will work?” Wren said.

Silence. Charles cleared his throat.

“There is a marriage arrangement,” he said. “Between our family and the Lockharts. It was settled many years ago. Sera was to be the bride.”

“I’m not marrying a man I’ve never met,” Sera said, bored, examining her nails. “I’m not a pawn.”

The room was very quiet. Wren heard a clock somewhere, patient and expensive.

“They told me it was only a formality,” Sera went on, to nobody in particular. “A formality. As if a person were a stamp.” For one second her eyes flashed with something that was almost, if you squinted, hurt. Then it was gone. “So I decided to stop being the one who pays for their formalities.”

“But you could be,” she finished, and smiled at Wren. “You look exactly like me. No one in the Lockhart family has seen me since I was twelve. You could just go instead.”

Wren understood, all at once and completely, why Margaret had never touched her.

She hadn’t been found. She had been retrieved, like a spare part from a shelf. The grief and the searching and the lost baby were set dressing. The parents who had finally come for her had come for a face. She was a tool, again, for the second time in her life.

She thought of Edna saying, People who give you everything usually want everything back. She thought of the hospital room and the IV and the hand that had once kneaded bread.

“You never wanted me,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“That is not—” Margaret began.

“You wanted her.” Wren nodded at Sera. “And she said no, so you came and got the one who couldn’t.”

“We wanted our family together,” Charles said smoothly.

“No,” Wren said.

“Show her to her room,” Margaret said to the housekeeper, without raising her voice. “We will speak tonight.”

The room was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor that Wren walked slowly, because the walls were hung with photographs. A baby in a christening gown. A girl in a tiny tutu. A girl on a pony, a girl in a graduation cap, a girl at some gala holding a glass she was far too young to hold. Every frame held Sera. At every age, in every light, she had been photographed and framed and hung, and the whole corridor said one thing clearly: she was wanted here.

Not one picture held a second child. Not a snapshot, not a stray hand at the edge of a frame. Somebody had removed Wren from this house as completely as you remove a stain.

The room itself was larger than her whole apartment. There was a canopy bed piled with pillows, a vase of white roses on the dresser, and a tall mirror by the window. Wren set down her duffel bag, crossed to the mirror, and stood there for a long time, looking at a face that belonged to two people.

On the dresser lay a cream envelope with her name written in careful handwriting: Wren. Not Seraphina, not “the girl.” Inside was a single card: Dinner is at eight. Do not be late. M. It was the first thing in this house addressed to her, and it read like a summons.

She was too tired to cry. Instead she sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded and waited, the way she had once waited outside principals’ offices and landlords’ doors, for the woman who was coming to tell her what her life would cost.