“Sit down,” he said.
I was standing in my own back-bedroom exile staring at the service drive, but I sat on the edge of the bed anyway.
“An LLC was formed eleven months ago in Vanessa Crowe’s name,” he said. “Marshline Residential Holdings. Registered in Nevada. That entity received title to your father’s Del Mar property five months later through a grant deed bearing what I’m increasingly comfortable calling a highly questionable signature. There are also two retirement withdrawals authorized with digital consent during the period your father was recovering from surgery, and a home-equity line opened under his identity three weeks after discharge.”
I said nothing.
Sometimes, when the truth arrives too fast, language actually slows you down.
Adrien continued, his voice very even. “I’ve got a forensic document examiner looking at the deed signature now. Initial opinion is not encouraging. The bank activity suggests funds moved in smaller transfers afterward, routed through accounts tied to Vanessa and, in one case, to Khloe. Also, your father’s charitable donation profile changed in the last year in ways that may matter if public reputation becomes relevant.”
Public reputation.
“Why would that matter?”
“Because Vanessa Crowe is listed as Philanthropist of the Year honoree for the California Legal Foundation Gala in June.”
I closed my eyes.
Of course she was.
Vanessa’s devotion to charity had always been theatrical rather than sacrificial. She loved galas, committees, donor walls, embossed invitations, and being photographed giving away sums that meant less to her than the coverage they bought. She liked philanthropy the way some women like expensive mirrors—not for what it reflected back into the world, but for the flattering shape it gave their own silhouette.
“I want everything,” I said.
“You’ll get it. But Bianca—”
“Yes?”
“If you intend to let them stay in that house while we build this, understand what you’re doing. You are choosing timing over comfort.”
I looked out at the bright slice of ocean visible from the back room window. My room now, apparently. The insult of it should have ignited me.
Instead all I felt was a cold clean readiness.
“They moved my clothes,” I said. “Timing it is.”
Over the next eighty-three days, my stepmother occupied my beach house like a woman already posing for the article she believed would one day be written about her.
She took the master suite and began referring to it as “our room” by the second evening. She had monogrammed towels shipped in cream and pale gold, V and D embroidered as though ownership could be stitched into cotton by force of confidence. She replaced the white peonies I’d ordered for the kitchen with orchids because she claimed peonies “shed like emotionally unstable bridesmaids.” She told the handyman to move a teak bench from the terrace because it interrupted the sightline from the dining table. She hired a chef for a dinner I never agreed to host and then complained that my kitchen lacked the proper warming drawers for serious entertaining. Every object in the house became, in her mind, a prompt for curating herself more deeply into its surface.
