Marchetti was my mother’s name — Italian, warm, entirely unconnected, as far as anyone knew, to the Ellsworth family that owned the tower we all worked in.

Rupert knew, of course, that Cornelius Ellsworth, the chairman, was my father.

That much was impossible to fully hide.

But he believed we were estranged — that there had been some old family rupture, that I was the disappointing daughter who had walked away from the dynasty and taken a different name to mark the break, and that the distance between us was real and permanent and to his considerable advantage.

The distance was real in only one sense.

It was a performance, and a required one.

The family trust that held our controlling stake in the company came with conditions written by my grandfather, a paranoid and brilliant man who had watched fortunes destroyed by heirs who announced themselves too loudly.

The beneficiary who controlled the trust was to remain, on paper and in public, at arm’s length from the company’s daily operations — no title, no visible authority, no name over any door.

It was a firewall.

It meant that the person with the most power in Ellsworth Technologies would always be the person no one thought to watch.