I Married the Son of the Man Who Killed My Mother · Nadia Voss

Chapter 1: The Vows

The cathedral held nine hundred people and I meant exactly one word of what I said in it.

"I, Ivy Rakes, take you, Nathaniel Wren."

That part was true. The rest — honour, cherish, all the days of my life — was said in a clear voice to a man I intended to ruin, in front of his father, who I intended to ruin more.

Eleven months earlier my mother's car had gone off the Fenwick bridge at four in the morning on a dry road with no other vehicle involved. The report ran to nine pages. The toxicology was sealed by the coroner at the request of an interested party, and the interested party was not named, and the phrase no suspicious circumstances appeared twice.

Two weeks before that, she had told me on the phone — quickly, in the tone she used for things she'd already decided — "Ivy, I'm going to publish something and it's going to be unpleasant for a while."

She never said what. She was a statistician; she thought details were a form of leaking.

The unpleasantness she anticipated was Wren Pharmaceutical, and the man who owned it was standing eleven feet from me in the front pew of St. Chad's, watching his only son marry the granddaughter of his oldest rival, and smiling like a man watching a bridge being built.

* * *

The marriage was my grandmother's idea, and I said yes in eleven seconds.

"Rakes Biologics has two years of cash and a pipeline of nothing," she'd said, in the study, in February, with the fire lit. Vivienne Rakes is eighty-one and runs a company from a wingback chair. "Wren has the pipeline and no distribution outside North America. There's a merger to be done and the family boards are both superstitious, so it will be done properly — which is to say, with a wedding."

"To Nathaniel."

"To Nathaniel. Thirty-four, sensible, runs their clinical division, no scandals worth the name." She'd looked at me over her glasses. "You'll say no, of course. You've spent eleven months in a very public grief and I imagine the idea of marrying into that family is—"

"Yes," I said.

That was the first time in my life I have ever seen my grandmother genuinely surprised. She covered it in about a second and a half, which is fast for eighty-one.

"Yes?"

"Yes."

Because the thing nobody in my family understood — and this is what I have learned about grief, that it is treated as a weather condition, something you wait out — was that I had spent those eleven months not weeping. I had spent them reading.

I read the coroner's file. I read four years of Wren's trial registrations. I read a Danish paper on the same compound that had been withdrawn from a journal without explanation in the same month my mother died. I built a spreadsheet of eleven names and by the summer, six of them wouldn't take my calls, two had signed something, one was dead, and one — a nurse in Toledo — had said, before she hung up: "Don't call this number again. Please. I've got a daughter."

I had one thing left and no way to get it. Every trial Wren has ever run is archived in a private vault in the basement of Gerald Wren's house on Hallam Road, because the man does not believe in cloud storage and has said so on television.

Nine hundred guests. A cathedral. And a house on Hallam Road where the family goes for Sunday lunch.

"Yes," I said again. "I'll marry him."

* * *

Nathaniel Wren, at the altar, was not what I had built in my head.

I'd met him three times in six months, each time chaperoned by lawyers, and he had been polite, brief, and entirely unreadable. Tall, dark, a habit of looking at whoever was speaking with an unsettling completeness of attention. He had asked me exactly one personal question in three meetings.

The second meeting, in a conference room, while the lawyers argued about a clause.

"How long since your mother died?"

"Nine months."

"Then I'd like the record to show that I said this now and not later." He'd kept his voice down. "You don't have to do this. Whatever's been said to you about the state of your family's balance sheet — it's survivable without a wedding. I've seen it."

"That's a strange thing to say to a woman you're trying to marry."

"I'm not trying to marry you," Nathaniel Wren had said. "I'm being married to you. There's a difference, and I've made my peace with it, and it costs me nothing to make sure you get to make yours."

I hadn't known what to do with that. I filed it under charming, therefore dangerous, which is what my mother would have said.

At the altar he said his vows without one syllable of tremor, and when the priest said the words about a ring he put it on my finger and his hand was perfectly steady and slightly cold.

Then he looked at me — properly, the way he does — and something went across his face that I did not understand for another six hours.

It looked like relief.

* * *

The reception was two hundred people, and Gerald Wren gave a speech about two families and one future, and I stood beside my husband and clapped with the room.

At half past ten I went to find Vivienne, and found her instead in the small salon with Gerald, and the door not quite shut, and I did the thing that granddaughters do.

"—not a problem," Gerald was saying. "Nothing's a problem if it's handled early. That's the whole of business."

"She reads," my grandmother said. "That's the difficulty with Ivy. Beatrice was the same. You give either of them a number and they'll go looking for the second number."

"Then it's as well she's ours now."

Ours. I stood on the other side of a door in a wedding dress and heard my grandmother say nothing at all to that.

"Vivienne." Gerald's voice dropped. "The Hallam Road archive. Nobody goes down there. Not the family, not the girl, not on Sundays, not for a coat. If she asks, the answer is that it's regulated storage and the insurance forbids it. Say the word insurance and people stop asking."

"She won't ask," my grandmother said. "She'll go."

There was a pause.

"Then you'd better make sure she's never alone in that house," Gerald said.

* * *

We drove to the Bellhaven at midnight. Separate rooms had been agreed in writing, which was the single most civilised clause in eleven pages.

At the door of the suite, Nathaniel said, "Before you go in. Can I have five minutes?"

"It's been a long day."

"It has. And I have been waiting four years for the person you turned out to be, so I'd rather not wait another night." He held out a folder. Plain, grey, the corner slightly bent, the way a thing gets when it's been carried in a bag for a long time. "Take this in with you. Open it or don't."

I took it.

"What is it?"

"The floor plan of my father's basement," Nathaniel Wren said. "Including the two doors that aren't on the fire certificate, the make of the lock on the inner room, and the four Sundays a year the house is empty because he goes to Zurich."

The corridor was extremely quiet.

"Nathaniel—"

"Your mother's name was Beatrice Rakes and she was the lead statistician on the Danish arm of the Corvale trial," he said. "She had 300 patient records and she was eight days from publication. I know because I gave them to her."

I could not speak.

"I've been trying to get that data out of my father's house since 2021," he said. "I can't do it alone — the inner room takes two keys and one of them lives on my father's own ring. But it also opens for a Wren spouse, because my grandmother wrote the protocol in 1988 and nobody has amended it since." He almost smiled. "I did not marry you for a merger, Ivy. I married you because you're the only person alive who wants that room opened as much as I do."