What he didn’t know was that my quiet father was the sole managing partner of Hartwell Capital — the private equity firm currently, and barely, keeping the Cross family’s over-leveraged, failing luxury-hotel business out of bankruptcy.

And what neither Daniel nor his mother knew was that the ornate “decorative” smart-doorbell outside their grand entryway didn’t just ring. It recorded.

It uploaded every second of high-definition video and clear audio to an encrypted cloud account — a system I’d quietly installed months earlier, after Vivian repeatedly let herself into my apartment to go through my mail.

Mother leaned close to my ear, her voice a sharp whisper under the monitors’ beeping. “Claire. Did she do this on purpose?”

“Yes,” I rasped.

“Did Daniel see her do it?”