Chapter 4 - THE ROOM WITHOUT CAMERAS
By Thursday morning the video had been viewed more than a hundred thousand times.
I learned this because Aunt June read the number aloud while sitting across from me at her kitchen table. The bakery downstairs was preparing cinnamon rolls. Sweet yeast and coffee drifted through the floorboards, an ordinary smell in a week when nothing else felt ordinary.
“Stop reading it,” I told her.
“I’m monitoring the enemy.”
“You’re making yourself angry before breakfast.”
“I can do two things at once.”
My shoulder hurt less, but my jaw still looked like someone had painted it with a bruise-colored brush. Gabriel had arranged for a specialist to review the injury, and Ruth had helped me understand my options for filing a workplace assault complaint. I had signed my own papers, asked my own questions, and insisted on keeping copies. It felt important to have something no one else controlled.
The doorbell rang. Mrs. Doyle stood outside, holding a brown paper bag.
“Soup,” she said. “And your last two pay statements. I refused to bring flowers. You can’t eat flowers.”
I hugged her carefully with my uninjured side.
She sat at June’s table, folded her hands, and told us something that made the soup go cold.
“There is a room behind the old library at the mansion,” she said. “The small sitting room with the green wallpaper. Celeste used it for private meetings. She asked that the hallway cameras be disconnected for the engagement preparations.”
“Were they?” I asked.
“Temporarily. Or so I was told.”
“Who approved that?”
Mrs. Doyle hesitated. “Edwin Cross.”
I knew the name. Cross was Gabriel’s chief financial officer, a charming man with graying hair who always greeted the staff in Italian and rarely looked them in the eye afterward. At dinner he had sat three chairs from Celeste and laughed at her jokes.
“He handled the renovations,” Mrs. Doyle continued. “And the vendor contracts. When I complained about the cameras, he said privacy was necessary for celebrity guests.”
I thought about Sloane’s face on the school monitor. “Did he ever meet Celeste there?”
“Three times. Maybe four. I brought coffee. They stopped talking whenever I entered.”
There were no secret recording devices hidden in the wallpaper, no convenient confession left on a desk. There was, however, a paper cleaning schedule with names, times, and the initials of the people who had requested the room. Mrs. Doyle had kept the original because she managed her staff using a binder instead of an app.
“Never throw away a working system,” she said, passing me a copy.
I called Ruth. She asked Mrs. Doyle to keep the binder safe and said the relevant records could be requested and preserved through the investigation. Then she told us Margaret Chen, Theo’s co-trustee, had agreed to meet that afternoon.
“Is she okay?” I asked.
“She is,” Ruth said. “Angry, but okay.”
Margaret lived in a modest condominium overlooking a park, not the mansion I would have expected of someone who managed a trust worth millions. She was in her sixties, wore round glasses, and greeted us with a question rather than a smile.
“Who has been using my name?”
Gabriel and Theo were already sitting in her living room. An old black Labrador slept beneath the coffee table. Theo was explaining the concept of gravitational pull through his tablet while Margaret listened with an intensity that made him sit taller.
Ruth spread copies of the suspicious trust paperwork across a table. Margaret examined the signature attributed to her, then shook her head.
“That isn’t mine. The date alone is wrong. I was in Seattle that week with my sister.”
She produced travel receipts, calendar entries, and a copy of an email she had sent refusing to approve the Westhaven loan. Her reason was simple: the proposed deal would put assets intended for Theo’s future support at unacceptable risk, and the explanations did not add up.
Gabriel looked at the paperwork. “Why didn’t you call me directly?”
“I did. Your office said you were unavailable. Mr. Cross replied that you had delegated the matter.”
“I hadn’t.”
“I suspected as much,” she said. “That’s why I refused to sign.”
Theo raised his tablet. “Mom picked you.”
Margaret’s face softened. “She did.”
“Why?”
“Because I argued with her,” Margaret answered. “Your mother said anybody who never disagreed with a wealthy man was not the right person to protect his child’s money.”
Gabriel laughed once, his first genuine laugh all week.
Margaret slid a folder toward him. Inside was a letter from Isabella explaining the purpose of the trust. She wanted Theo to have medical care, educational support, opportunities to live independently when he chose, and resources that could not be used to make decisions over his head. The trust was never meant to determine where he lived or whom he loved.
“Money should widen his choices,” Margaret said. “Not narrow them.”
Theo typed, “Like telescope choices.”
“Especially those,” Margaret replied with mock seriousness.
When the meeting ended, Ruth took the forged documents for the proper filings and Margaret agreed to cooperate with investigators. She also said she had already noticed an unexplained withdrawal from a subsidiary account that the bank was reviewing. It was not the whole inheritance, but it was enough money to make her extremely uneasy.
On the drive home, Gabriel rode with me and Aunt June, since Marcus was taking Theo to a scheduled appointment. Gabriel had insisted he could arrange a car. June had replied that her old sedan was perfectly capable of transporting one intimidating millionaire.
“Your mother would have liked her,” Gabriel told me quietly as June negotiated traffic.
“My mother?”
“Isabella. She loved people who told me when I was being ridiculous.”
“My aunt does that professionally.”
A little smile appeared at the corner of his mouth, then vanished. “I should go back to the house tonight. There’s something I need to see in the library.”
I knew what he meant. A framed photograph of Isabella and Theo hung near the green room. But that was not the only reason.
“I can tell you exactly where Celeste kept the wooden box before she moved it,” I said.
“No. You’re recovering.”
“I’m not offering to wrestle furniture. I’m offering to show you a shelf.”
June caught his eye in the rearview mirror. “If she goes, I go. Nobody gets locked in any rooms.”
The mansion looked different without the engagement decorations. Workmen had removed the white roses. The long dining table was bare except for a small vase of yellow daisies Theo had chosen. He was upstairs working on Saturn with Marcus nearby, and Gabriel’s security team had already documented the green room before we arrived.
The room smelled of lemon polish and stale perfume. Pale light fell through narrow windows. Along the wall stood a cabinet of sheet music, old photo albums, and a carved wooden globe. Celeste had used the place as an office without asking, moving Isabella’s framed photographs to make space for her own arrangements.
“That bothered Theo,” I said. “He said the room didn’t feel like home afterward.”
Gabriel replaced the photographs one by one.
In the bottom drawer of the cabinet was a plain manila folder. Gabriel did not touch it until Marcus photographed its position and called Ruth for advice. The folder contained an inventory of the letters removed from Isabella’s box, each listed beside a proposed replacement theme: independence, separation, maturity, residential education.
It was not merely cruel improvisation. Someone had organized it.
At the bottom of the page, under an internal approval line, were the initials E.C.
Edwin Cross.
Mrs. Doyle had been right.
My phone buzzed as Gabriel read the list. A new video was circulating. This one showed me standing in the dining room with Theo’s tablet. My voice had been replaced by a confident female voice claiming I had been paid to accuse Celeste falsely.
The false statement ended with my full name and the words, “I will testify that Gabriel Vescari directed me to lie.”
I looked at my bruised reflection in the green room mirror.
“It’s my face,” I whispered. “But those are not my words.”
Gabriel took one step toward me, then stopped, leaving me space to breathe.
“We’ll document it,” he said. “We’ll challenge it. And I’ll make sure you have your own lawyer if you want one.”
I put the phone on the table. “I want more than that.”
“What?”
“I want Theo to see people believe him without having to bleed for their attention.”
Gabriel lowered his eyes. “So do I.”
A moment later Marcus came through the doorway with a fresh printout. The court had accepted an emergency filing for review the next morning. Included in it was the fabricated video of me and a statement attributed to Theo.
The lawyer submitting it was Graham Sloane.
And the person named as proposed temporary guardian was Celeste Valenti.
Before we left the room, Theo appeared in the doorway with his father’s permission. He stopped when he saw Isabella’s pictures back on the shelf. One showed her holding a paper moon above his crib; another showed her laughing in a bright red sweater while he examined a toy telescope. He studied the arrangement for a long moment.
“Better,” his tablet announced.
Gabriel nodded. “Better.”
Theo turned toward the empty space where Celeste had displayed an enormous framed photograph of herself. He took a little picture from his backpack and placed it there. It was a photograph of three hands holding a cardboard Saturn: his, Gabriel’s, and mine. The rings were crooked. I remembered how much we had laughed trying to glue them straight.
May you like
“Family project,” Theo typed.
Gabriel stared at the picture, and I saw what it cost him to smile. He was grateful that we were standing together. He was also afraid the next day might take it all away.
