Part 8
He nodded.
Celeste exhaled.
“I’m sorry.”
“No. You don’t need to be sorry.”
“Yes, I do.” She looked toward Wren. “I keep hearing accusations in every question.”
Mason’s voice lowered.
“Because someone made you one.”
Celeste met his eyes.
For a second, the room became quiet around them.
Then Wren began to cough.
The sound was small, but it broke whatever fragile understanding had started to form.
Mason rubbed her back.
“Do you want water?”
The girl nodded.
Celeste went to the tray on the dressing table and poured water into a small glass. She held it out, then stopped when Wren looked uncertain.
“Mason can give it to you,” she said.
He took the glass.
Wren drank slowly from it while he held it.
Celeste stood nearby, hands empty.
Mason watched her face.
He had never wanted children before. Not exactly. He had not wanted not to have them. He had simply treated the question as something that belonged to a later version of his life, one where work was calmer, his father’s expectations were lighter, money was less tied to obligation, and he had become the kind of person who did not postpone difficult decisions.
Celeste had asked him about children once, sitting on the balcony of their apartment while rain rattled against the glass.
“Do you want them?” she asked.
“Someday.”
“Is someday a real answer?”
He had kissed her instead of answering.
Now, holding Wren beneath the warm light of a private suite, he understood what Celeste had heard in his silence.
Not uncertainty.
Avoidance.
Mrs. Vann cleared her throat.
“There’s another matter.”
Mason looked at her.
“The woman entered using a guest pass generated from the wedding account,” she said. “But the pass was sent to a private email address.”
Celeste’s gaze lifted.
“What address?”
Mrs. Vann hesitated.
“It is not one I recognize.”
“Read it.”
The manager looked at the tablet.
“C. Rowan archive.”
Celeste’s face drained of color.
Mason knew immediately that the address meant something.
“What is that?” he asked.
Celeste did not answer.
“Celeste.”
She looked at him.
“It was my father’s old email,” she said.
The words came quietly.
“He used it before he died. My mother kept access to it because there were financial documents and old photographs stored there.”
“Could someone else have used it?”
“My mother. Maybe my aunt. Maybe the estate planner if she had been forwarded something. I don’t know.”
Mason watched the fear arrive in her face.
Not fear for herself.
Fear that the day was pulling her family into a story she could not control.
“What does your father have to do with Nora?” he asked.
Celeste shook her head.
“Nothing.”
But she did not sound certain.
Wren looked up at her.
“Was he the man Mommy talked about?”
Celeste froze.
Mason’s chest tightened.
“What man?” he asked.
Wren put down the glass.
“Mommy said there was a man who made people scared to talk.”
The room went silent.
Celeste sat down slowly in the armchair.
Her face had lost all color.
“What did she say his name was?” Mason asked.
Wren frowned, trying to remember.
“He had a last name like… Row.”
Mason looked at Celeste.
Celeste’s eyes filled.
“My father’s name was Charles Rowan,” she said.
Mason knew that.
Everyone in their world knew that. Charles Rowan had been a powerful developer, a donor, a man whose name appeared on hospital wings and cultural foundations. He had been dead for eleven years, killed by a heart attack at sixty-two, leaving Celeste and her mother a fortune that had made grief easier to conceal but not easier to survive.
Mason had met Charles only once, years before he met Celeste. At a charity dinner in Manhattan. The older man had shaken his hand and said, “Harrow. Your father is still impossible, then?”
Mason had laughed because he did not know what else to do.
Now he remembered Charles’s eyes.
Cool. Measured. Familiar with rooms where people lowered their voices around him.
“He had no connection to Nora,” Celeste said.
Mason did not answer.
Celeste rose abruptly.
“I mean it. He didn’t.”
“I’m not saying he did.”
“But you’re thinking it.”
“I’m trying to understand.”
“So am I.”
Her voice cracked on the last words.
Wren watched her carefully.
Celeste stopped, closed her eyes, then crouched in front of the child.
“Wren,” she said. “Did your mom ever say Charles Rowan’s name?”
The girl shook her head.
“Did she show you a picture?”
“No.”
“Did she say where the man lived?”
“In a big house.”
Celeste looked around the room.
May you like
The vineyard estate belonged to her family.
The reception had been planned here because it was the one place Celeste still felt her father’s memory without feeling trapped by it. She had spent summers on the property as a child, running through the olive trees, hiding in the empty wine cellar, reading books beneath the old fig tree near the south terrace.
