Chapter 4
The estate search produced no love letters.
No hidden photographs.
No second phone filled with romantic messages.
No hotel receipts.
No evidence that Celeste and Marcus had ever been physically intimate.
Claire warned Dante not to let absence of evidence become proof of innocence.
He agreed.
Still, the digital pattern was strange.
Celeste and Marcus exchanged very few messages.
The ones they did exchange were short.
Tonight.
Ten minutes.
Bring the copies.
Not here.
You said this was finished.
Nothing affectionate.
Nothing sexual.
Nothing that sounded like lovers.
The messages sounded hostile.
Dante read one twice.
You said this was finished.
Marcus replied:
It is when I say it is.
Dante felt something colder than jealousy.
“What copies?”
Claire asked.
“We don’t know.”
The next clue came from Celeste’s former personal assistant, Leah Brooks.
Leah had left two months earlier.
Celeste told Dante she found a better position.
Leah said she quit.
“Mrs. Caruso started asking me to do things I wasn’t comfortable doing.”
“What things?”
“Pick up sealed envelopes from the family office. Deliver folders to Mr. Marcus’s office. Remove invoices from household files after they were approved.”
Dante’s eyes narrowed.
“What invoices?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ask?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She said I was paid to assist, not audit.”
Leah eventually refused to remove a document from an accounting binder.
Celeste fired her the next morning.
Claire asked for the dates.
They aligned three times with Marcus’s late visits to the residential wing.
Now there was a pattern.
Documents moved.
Marcus visited.
Celeste became angry.
Invoices disappeared.
Dante’s suspicion shifted again.
That evening he reviewed Ava’s household expenses.
After Ava’s biological mother, Elena, died two years earlier, a trust she had established continued paying specific costs for her daughter: education, medical care, approved security, childcare, and certain residential expenses.
Dante had known the structure.
He had not personally reviewed every reimbursement.
The family office handled that.
Celeste had authorization to submit household invoices when Dante traveled.
Claire noticed one vendor.
Wellington Child Development Services.
The trust had reimbursed almost $94,000 to the company over ten months.
Dante frowned.
“I’ve never heard of it.”
Claire opened the invoices.
Private developmental consulting.
Home educational support.
Specialized child-environment planning.
Dante looked toward the ceiling as if he could see Ava’s room through it.
“She’s three.”
“Yes.”
“She has a preschool and a therapist she met yesterday.”
“Yes.”
“She has never had a private developmental consultant.”
Claire closed the file.
Now they finally had something that could be checked without asking a child anything.
The next morning, they learned Wellington Child Development Services had no licensed child-development professionals.
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It was registered to an address that belonged to an accounting service.
And its original incorporator had once worked for Celeste.
