I showed the driver the rooms Vanessa had assigned themselves because fighting over bags in a foyer would have given her what she wanted most: a scene she could translate later. I let Khloe gasp over the ocean-view bedroom on the second floor and instruct the housekeeper I did not have about where she liked her chargers placed. I let Vanessa sweep into the master suite and stand in the doorway with proprietary satisfaction, touching the carved edge of the dresser like a woman appraising inheritance.
“This feels right,” she said over her shoulder. “Daniel, don’t you think?”
My father looked at me.
It was the kind of look that lasts less than a second and says too much for anyone else in the room to interpret: I know. I’m sorry. Not yet. All of that, compressed.
“It’s a lovely room,” he said carefully.
Vanessa took that as agreement.
By noon, my clothes had been moved from the master closet into a smaller room at the back of the house facing the service drive instead of the water. Not by me. By Khloe and Vanessa together, apparently, while I was in the kitchen making coffee for my father because he looked pale from the trip and I wanted to put something ordinary in his hands before the day turned fully absurd.
When I walked into the back room and saw my dresses crammed beside the ironing board cabinet, something in me should have broken.
Instead it organized itself.
I took photographs.
Every drawer Vanessa had emptied. Every garment bag now hanging in the master closet. The way Khloe’s skincare fridge sat plugged in beneath the balcony window while my suitcases remained unopened against a wall. The orchids Vanessa had placed in the foyer as if she were the hostess. The text from the previous night still glowing in my phone. The time stamps on everything.
Then I called my attorney.
Adrien Cole answered on the second ring with his usual dry clarity. “Tell me you’re calling because escrow misfiled something and not because someone’s died.”
Adrien had been my attorney for seven years, though “attorney” doesn’t fully cover what he had become in my life. He handled acquisitions, entity formation, contracts, and the occasional emergency when wealthy people behaved like unsupervised children in expensive shoes. He was forty-two, sharp, impossible to rush, and built like a man who had once rowed crew at an elite college and never quite abandoned the posture. If he had one flaw, it was that he enjoyed being right in ways most people would find unsporting. Fortunately, rightness is a useful trait in counsel.
