Someone had expected him to.
By noon, the engagement was over.
Bianca did not cry when Vittorio told her.
She asked whether he understood what assault charges could do to a man with his reputation.
That told him enough about what mattered to her.
Marcus was taken to an urgent-care clinic by his attorney. Bianca left the Lake Forest estate with him soon afterward, carrying two suitcases and promising through clenched teeth that Vittorio would regret humiliating her.
Vittorio did not answer.
His attention had shifted elsewhere.
At Romano Freight & Warehousing’s offices near O’Hare, chief financial officer David Mercer spread six months of payment reports across a conference table.
Vittorio had called him away from his daughter’s soccer game.
David was not pleased about it.
Then he saw the numbers.
“These security vendors,” Vittorio said. “Who approved them?”
David pushed his glasses higher.
“Marcus.”
“That isn’t what the system says.”
David turned the laptop.
Every payment showed Vittorio Romano as final authorization.
There were twenty-three of them.
Some exceeded eighty thousand dollars.
Vittorio stared at his electronic initials.
“I never saw these.”
David hesitated.
“You gave Marcus delegated approval authority after Elena got sick.”
“For routine expenses.”
“He’s been using it for more than routine expenses.”
Vittorio remembered those months.
Hospital rooms. Morphine schedules. Lucy learning to walk while Elena was losing the strength to stand.
Marcus had placed documents in front of him almost every night.
Vittorio had signed because he trusted his wife’s brother-in-law by friendship if not blood, a man who had worked beside him for seventeen years.
David opened another file.
“One vendor doesn’t have employees that I can verify.”
“Who owns it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Vittorio looked toward the dark window.
For years, men had called him dangerous because he noticed weakness before anyone else.
Apparently grief had made him blind in his own house.
His phone rang.
His attorney, Rachel Stein.
“Bianca and Marcus are both considering complaints,” she said. “Before you say anything stupid, understand something. Emma’s video helps explain what happened. It does not erase what you did.”
“I know.”
Rachel paused.
“You don’t usually say that.”
“I’m learning.”
When Vittorio returned home that evening, Lucy was asleep in his sister Theresa’s guest room.
Emma waited in Elena’s study.
One drawer stood open.
“I checked because of what Lucy said,” she told him.
The drawer had held Elena’s personal accounting papers.
It was empty.
Vittorio looked at Emma.
She looked terrified again.
This time, he understood why.
“Tell me what you took,” he said.
Emma whispered, “I didn’t take it.”
Then she reached behind a row of Elena’s old gardening books.
“But I know who did.”
Behind the gardening books was not Elena’s notebook.
It was a folded housekeeping schedule.
Emma pointed to four dates circled in blue ink.
“Those were nights Marcus came here after everyone else had gone upstairs.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he asked me to stay late and clean this room.”
Marcus almost never entered Elena’s study when she was alive.
After her death, he had apparently found reasons to visit repeatedly.
Emma had written the dates down because the requests bothered her.
Vittorio photographed the schedule and called David Mercer.
“Freeze Marcus’s access.”
“To what?”
“Everything.”
David inhaled.
“Vittorio, he manages half the vendor network.”
“Then tomorrow we learn whether we own a company or whether Marcus does.”
The consequence arrived before breakfast.
Two trucking subcontractors stopped dispatching loads because payments had been suspended.
A bank compliance officer called asking why authorized transfers were suddenly being challenged.
Three managers demanded to know whether the company was solvent.
Marcus had made himself difficult to remove.
That had been the point.
Vittorio hired an outside forensic accounting firm anyway.
Then he made a second decision.
He gave Rachel Stein a copy of Emma’s video.
“Preserve the original metadata,” he said.
Rachel looked surprised.
“You understand this also shows you hitting them.”
“Yes.”
“You could keep it inside the family for now.”
“No.”
The old Vittorio would have protected the family name first.
The old Vittorio had also left his daughter alone with Bianca.
That afternoon, he took Lucy to the pediatrician.
There were no serious injuries, only redness where Bianca had pulled her cardigan tight against her shoulder.
The doctor asked Lucy questions while Vittorio remained outside.
He hated that.
He hated more that it was appropriate.
When Lucy came out, she walked past him and took Theresa’s hand.
Vittorio did not protest.
Back at the estate, one of the security supervisors brought him entry records from the smart locks.
Marcus’s code had opened Elena’s study six times during the previous two months.
Bianca’s had opened it twice.
One entry had occurred at 1:17 in the morning.