Chapter 4
I had two things done that same evening, before my mother had finished unpacking her composure from the entryway floor. I called our family's estate attorney to confirm, in writing, exactly what I already knew — that Elodie's standing as my daughter and heir had never been legally ambiguous in any way my mother's comments suggested, and that any attempt to alter that standing without my direct, documented consent would trigger review clauses my own father had built into the family trust decades earlier specifically to prevent exactly this kind of internal maneuvering.
The second thing I did was have security review the house's internal records — deliveries, staff schedules, room assignment requests — from the eleven days I'd been away. What came back confirmed what I'd started to suspect the moment I saw how quickly Rocco's belongings had already made it up the stairs: my mother hadn't decided to move Rocco into Elodie's room that afternoon. She'd been planning it for at least three weeks, coordinating movers and staff schedules around my travel calendar specifically so the transition would already be complete, framed as an accomplished fact, by the time I returned.
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Greta, when I finally sat down with her privately, admitted she'd tried twice to raise concerns with my mother about moving forward without my direct approval, and had been told, both times, that "Vittorio already knows, he just hasn't said anything yet" — a lie specifically constructed to keep staff compliant without giving anyone a clear reason to call me directly and check.
That detail bothered me more than almost anything else. My mother hadn't just made a cruel decision about my daughter's bedroom. She'd built a small, deliberate infrastructure of misdirection to make sure nobody in the house felt authorized to stop her before it was already done.
