“My stepmother moved into my beach house this morning,” I said, “reassigned my bedroom, and brought her daughter’s skincare refrigerator.”
There was a pause.
Then: “I’m going to need that repeated at a speed my legal education can process.”
I repeated it.
When I finished, Adrien let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a curse. “Are you safe?”
“Yes.”
“Are they legal occupants?”
“No.”
“Good. Then why do I feel there’s a second call coming hidden inside this first call?”
Because months earlier, after my father’s heart scare, I had asked Adrien to quietly review a transfer deed tied to my father’s Del Mar property.
At the time, the reason had seemed vague even to me. My father had mentioned in passing that Vanessa was “simplifying some things.” Then a county notice misdelivered to my old San Diego condo caught my eye because the signature line on a scanned copy, which my father forwarded absentmindedly while asking whether I knew why county notices looked different now, didn’t sit right. It looked like his name written by someone trying too hard not to imitate his own. Adrien had glanced at it and said, “Maybe nothing, maybe very much something, but without context we’d be burning money to speculate.”
Now there was context.
“I want the Del Mar deed file,” I said. “The full pull. The one you warned me about.”
Adrien’s tone changed immediately. “What happened?”
“She lied to my father about this house. He thought he was visiting. She thought she was moving in. If she’s been running different stories in my direction and his, I want every piece of paper she’s touched since his cardiac rehab.”
“Understood.” A beat. “Do not confront them. Do not throw them out today. Do not, under any circumstances, become the dramatic daughter in any version of the story she gets to tell first. Send me everything. Photos, texts, whatever you have.”
“I’m already doing it.”
“I know,” he said, and because he knew me well enough now, the sentence wasn’t patronizing. It was an acknowledgment of method. “Give me two hours.”
By lunchtime, while Vanessa directed florists over the phone from my terrace and Khloe filmed a room tour for an audience I prayed did not include anyone with a functioning moral compass, Adrien’s team was pulling records.
By late afternoon, he called back.
