Chapter 1
I'd been away for eleven days on a deal that had eaten more of my attention than any single business trip had a right to, and I'd told my mother, before I left, that Elodie's room was not open for discussion — not for storage, not for guests, not for anyone, under any circumstance, while I was gone. I'd told her that specifically because I'd caught her, twice in the previous month, making offhand comments about how a child "her age" didn't need "that much space," comments I'd dismissed at the time as my mother being her usual particular self about the house rather than anything I needed to take seriously.
I flew home a full day earlier than planned, mostly because I'd finished the deal faster than expected and wanted to surprise Elodie before her bedtime. Instead, I walked into an entryway full of stacked moving boxes, watched two movers carry a boy's belongings up the staircase toward my daughter's room, and found Elodie herself sitting on the floor beside those boxes, crying, her stuffed rabbit clutched against her chest, exactly the way she used to hold it during the worst weeks after her mother left us three years earlier.
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"A real heir gets the best room," my mother said, standing over her, not even lowering her voice for the benefit of the staff member — Greta, who'd worked for our family for almost a decade — frozen a few feet away holding a stack of Elodie's bedding like she didn't know whether putting it down would mean taking a side.
"Grandma said I sleep in storage now," Elodie told me, the second she saw me at the top of the stairs, and something about the flat, resigned way a six-year-old said that sentence — like she'd already accepted it as fact rather than protesting it as unfair — turned whatever calm I'd walked in with into something else entirely.
