Chapter 7
The first recovered fragment from the spreadsheet arrived Thursday.
It contained four columns.
Pressure Point.
Sofia Response.
Raffaele Response.
Next Step.
Claire read the headings twice before showing Raffaele.
The individual notes were fragmentary.
One line mentioned the dinner where Sofia had been told to refill wine.
Sofia response:
Angry privately. No public refusal.
Raffaele response:
Defends D as tradition.
Another concerned the canceled visit to Sofia’s father.
Sofia response:
Blames R.
Raffaele response:
Unaware.
Claire looked at him.
“That one is hard to interpret innocently.”
Raffaele said nothing.
A third entry involved the altered screenshot.
Raffaele response:
Confronted S. Trust reduced.
The phrase made his stomach turn.
Trust reduced.
His marriage had been reduced to a variable in someone’s spreadsheet.
“What was next step?”
“Missing.”
The forensic specialist recovered a later line.
Need separation before residence transition.
Raffaele looked up.
“What residence transition?”
Claire already knew.
Six months earlier, Raffaele and Sofia had begun discussing leaving the family estate.
They had quietly toured houses.
Nothing public.
Nothing signed.
Raffaele had eventually agreed.
He wanted distance from constant family traffic.
Sofia wanted a home where Delia did not enter without calling.
They had chosen a property in Lake Forest.
Closing was scheduled for the following month.
Only a handful of people knew.
Delia was one.
The same period overlapped with another change.
Raffaele had begun planning to move the legitimate Montoro hospitality companies out of the estate-based family office and into a professional downtown headquarters.
The family council would lose daily influence.
Family relatives would still own shares.
They would not automatically control operations.
Delia hated the plan.
She called the proposed headquarters “a glass box full of outsiders.”
Raffaele had dismissed her complaints as nostalgia.
Now Claire placed the spreadsheet beside the relocation plans.
“Sofia leaving you would have affected both moves.”
“How?”
“You tell me.”
Raffaele thought.
If Sofia had left, he would not have moved into the Lake Forest house.
The estate relocation had been her idea first.
And after a public marital failure, Raffaele knew exactly what the family would have told him.
Come home.
Stay close.
Don’t change anything while unstable.
Let blood handle blood.
Claire saw his expression.
“There.”
“What?”
“You just understood the advantage.”
Raffaele nodded slowly.
But they still did not know whether Delia merely hoped for separation or deliberately engineered it from the beginning.
The difference mattered.
Then Nathan called.
A second archive had been located.
Not inside Delia’s family-office drive.
May you like
Inside the event-planning server.
It contained complete versions of the altered screenshots.
