Chapter 5
Juliet had her own questions.
She asked them after Mabel was discharged.
“Why did your mother care whether I left dinner?”
Fabio told her the financial outline.
Not every confidential number.
Enough.
Juliet listened.
Then:
“That still doesn’t explain why she treated Mabel’s fever like an inconvenience.”
“No.”
“She could have just let us go and argued with you later.”
“Yes.”
Juliet looked toward Mabel, asleep on the sofa.
“Unless the argument was the point.”
Fabio said nothing.
Juliet continued.
“She knew you would follow me.”
“Yes.”
“She knew dinner would end.”
“Yes.”
“And she needed you angry.”
Fabio hated hearing it from someone else.
Because it sounded plausible.
Then Juliet remembered another detail.
“Your mother asked me something last week.”
“What?”
“If you’d ever frightened me.”
Fabio looked up sharply.
“What did you say?”
“I laughed.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought she meant your reputation.”
“What exactly did she ask?”
Juliet thought.
“‘When Fabio gets angry, has he ever made you feel physically unsafe?’”
Fabio’s expression changed.
“And?”
“I said no.”
“Did she ask about hitting?”
“She asked whether you break things.”
Fabio looked away.
That answer had history.
At thirty-two, Fabio punched a hole through a study door during a fight with his father.
Thirteen years ago.
At thirty-seven, he threw a glass into an empty fireplace after learning a business partner had stolen from him.
No one was injured.
Still ugly.
Still evidence of temper.
Constance remembered both.
She had mentioned them constantly whenever Fabio criticized old family methods.
Juliet asked:
“Has she been collecting stories about you?”
Adrian answered from the doorway.
“Yes.”
He had arrived with another file.
Constance’s attorney had prepared a memorandum cataloging “historic volatility.”
The door.
The glass.
Two shouting matches.
A bodyguard statement from seven years earlier describing Fabio grabbing a cousin by the jacket during a fight.
Fabio closed his eyes.
“That happened.”
“Did you hit him?”
“No.”
“Threaten him?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
Fabio hesitated.
“I told him if he touched Juliet again, I’d bury his career.”
Adrian wrote it down.
“Not literally bury him?”
“No.”
“Good distinction in your family.”
Fabio did not smile.
The pattern was real enough to exploit.
Constance did not need to invent every incident.
She needed to arrange old facts around one new public act.
Then Adrian produced her attorney’s warning.
It said:
Any petition to restrict Fabio’s trustee participation must rely on genuine conduct. Client should not engineer or intentionally provoke confrontation.
Fabio stared.
Same legal reality.
Same problem.
May you like
His mother had been told not to stage evidence.
The next question was whether she listened.
