Chapter 5
I had my mother's and Rocco's belongings packed and moved to the guest estate on the north end of the property that same week — not out of the family entirely, not cut off from Rocco's own inheritance, which remained exactly what our father's trust had always guaranteed him, but out of the main house, and out of any position where either of them could make unilateral decisions about my daughter's life again.
Two bodyguards carried the suitcases down while my mother watched from the same staircase landing where I'd first seen the boxes headed toward Elodie's room. I don't think she expected me to actually follow through once the initial anger of that first evening had passed. I think she expected, as she had with smaller disagreements for years, that I'd eventually let the practical difficulty of confrontation wear down my resolve.
"You packed the wrong child," I told her, and I meant it as plainly as it sounds — she'd spent weeks quietly working to remove my daughter from her own home, and instead, she'd removed herself.
May you like
Elodie's things went back into her own room that same night. Greta carried her bedding back in personally, and I sat with my daughter until she fell asleep with her stuffed rabbit, in her own bed, in the room that had always been hers and, as far as I'm concerned, always will be.
Rocco still visits. I made sure of that deliberately — whatever my mother had tried to build between the two children, competing for space and standing in a house neither of them had asked to be pitted against each other in, wasn't something I wanted my nephew to carry forward as his own inheritance. He's welcome in that house any time he wants to be there. He just doesn't get to displace anyone to make room for himself, and neither, as it turned out, does my mother.
