What the Cameras Saw
He told her everything. The faked decline, the cameras, the collections letter, the phone call about the trust amendment signature. Minnie listened without interrupting once, her face going through disbelief, then fury, then something colder and more useful than either.
"Show me the footage," she said. "All of it."
They sat together in the study until well past midnight, Rosalind bringing coffee neither of them touched, while Cornelius scrolled through weeks of recordings. Most of it was nothing — Odalys on hold with caterers, Barnaby practicing a speech in the mirror. But some of it wasn't.
There was Odalys, three nights ago, sliding a page into a printer tray and adjusting it twice before feeding it through — the exact motion of someone lining up a signature to trace, not sign.
There was Barnaby on the phone with Alaric Wexford, saying, "just make sure the filing reads like Dad initiated the review himself. Judges like that."
And then there was a clip Cornelius hadn't watched all the way through — footage from the nanny-cam he'd insisted on installing in the guest wing "for Toby's safety" when the boy stayed over, an excuse nobody had questioned because it sounded so grandfatherly.
In the clip, Toby sat alone on the guest room bed, knees pulled to his chest, while raised voices carried faintly from downstairs — Barnaby's, sharp and furious about money. The boy didn't cry. He didn't move at all. He just went very still, the way small animals go still when something large walks past, and stayed that way for eleven full minutes until the shouting stopped.
Minnie's hand found Cornelius's arm and gripped it hard enough to hurt.
"That's not new," she said, voice shaking. "Dad, that's not the first time he's done that. I've seen him do that at Christmas."
Cornelius closed the laptop slowly, his jaw tight enough to ache, and for the first time in four months of careful performance, he stopped thinking about wills and power of attorney entirely.
"Keep watching," Rosalind said quietly from the doorway. "There's one more file. Timestamped an hour ago."
She hadn't opened it yet. She'd been waiting for exactly this moment.
Cornelius clicked it, and the screen filled with Odalys, alone in the study — his study — holding a blank sheet of paper up to the window, tracing his signature from an old document against the glass like a forger copying a bank note.