Chapter 7
The developer was not owned by Melisande.
Her brother did not work there.
There was no secret shell company.
No hidden property commission.
Grant spent days confirming that.
Leander was almost disappointed.
A simple financial conspiracy would have been easier to understand.
Then the developer’s internal correspondence produced something subtler.
Melisande had proposed working with them as an interior-design consultant if Leander sold the house and commissioned a new residence.
She had professional experience in luxury design before meeting him.
The developer offered a legitimate consulting arrangement.
If the Royce project proceeded, Melisande could earn approximately four hundred thousand dollars.
Significant.
Not enough to explain psychologically damaging two children.
Grant said:
“Money may not be the whole motive.”
Leander already suspected that.
Melisande had spent eighteen months living in a house Caroline chose.
Caroline’s wallpaper remained in the upstairs sitting room.
Caroline’s garden remained outside the breakfast room.
Caroline’s piano stood in the library.
Two children mentioned Caroline every day.
Melisande repeatedly suggested renovations.
Leander repeatedly postponed them.
Not because he worshipped the past.
Because Bastian and Ophelia were not ready.
A message from Melisande to a friend captured her resentment:
I’m expected to become his wife while living inside another woman’s museum. Even the children’s trust gets a vote before I do.
Another:
Nothing can change unless Bastian and Ophelia approve emotionally, and trustees approve legally.
Leander read it quietly.
The friend replied:
Then don’t marry into it.
Melisande answered:
I love him. I just need him to stop building his life around Caroline’s ghosts.
There it was.
Not a justification.
A motive beginning to take shape.
The house represented Caroline.
The trust represented Caroline.
The children carried Caroline’s memories.
Melisande did not merely want a better property.
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She wanted a marriage in which she was not living inside decisions made by a dead woman.
And instead of accepting that Leander’s children would always carry their mother into the future, she had begun treating their attachment to that history as a problem to solve.
