Chapter Five
Victoria’s photograph, it turned out, hadn’t been an accident.
Julian pulled the estate’s own security footage — the same cameras that fed the same system Beatrice’s household staff monitored around the clock — and found the full sequence Victoria had cropped down to a single damning frame. Dr. Webb arriving at 1:52 a.m. carrying a medical bag clearly marked with a clinic logo. Dr. Webb leaving forty minutes later, glancing at his phone, checking the time the way a man checks the time when he has an early surgery, not the way a man checks the time when he’s sneaking out of an affair.
Victoria hadn’t just seen a stranger at the gate. She had watched the full, unremarkable footage of a doctor’s house call, and chosen the one frame that could be twisted into a scandal — then sent it to her brother with a caption designed to detonate exactly what it detonated.
“You knew,” Julian said, when he found his sister in the solarium an hour later, his phone held up with the full, uncropped footage playing on the screen. “You knew exactly who that was.”
Victoria’s composure slipped for less than a second before she rebuilt it. “I knew a strange man was sneaking around this house at two in the morning while my brother was traveling. Forgive me for thinking that mattered.”
“You didn’t think it mattered. You thought it was useful.” Julian’s voice was flat now, stripped of the temper that had carried him up the stairs three days earlier. “Useful to Mother’s memo. Useful to a case against Elena’s fitness that’s been building since before this baby had a heartbeat anyone could hear.”
Victoria didn’t deny it. She simply looked at him, weighing, the way she’d been taught to weigh things her whole life — by cost, not by conscience — and said, “Mother only ever wanted to protect this family’s money from someone who married into it with nothing.”
“Mother,” Julian said, “was willing to let my wife go into premature labor unmonitored so a lawyer could write the word ‘incapacity’ on a piece of paper. That’s not protecting this family. That’s what it looks like when the family is the thing that needs to be protected from.”
