Ethan stared at the fireplace.
“I told him about the cake,” he said.
Anna waited.
“Uncle Victor asked which one was mine. I told him the little one with strawberries because Dad checked it.”
His breathing began to shorten.
“I helped him.”
Anna turned toward him.
“No.”
“I told him.”
“You told your uncle something ordinary. He chose what to do with it.”
Ethan rubbed his palms against his trousers, over and over.
Lily reached beneath the blanket and caught one of his hands.
“Your fork didn’t get any,” she said.
He looked at her fingers around his.
“No,” he whispered. “It didn’t.”
When Dominic entered, Ethan crossed the room so quickly that the blanket slipped to the floor.
His father knelt and caught him.
“Was it Uncle Victor?”
Dominic could not bring himself to offer a comforting lie.
“The police have taken him away. They’re gathering the evidence.”
“Did he want me dead?”
Dominic closed his eyes.
“We don’t know everything yet.”
Ethan pulled back enough to see his face.
“But he knew.”
“Yes,” Dominic said. “He knew you could die.”
The boy made no sound. He simply folded forward, his face disappearing against his father’s shoulder.
Anna turned Lily toward the window. Outside, blue lights moved across the wet gravel, soundless through the thick glass.
The guests left under police supervision. Officers took names, statements, and copies of photographs people had made during the party.
The cake, the container, the access logs, and Victor’s clothing went into evidence.
A corridor camera showed him lifting Anna’s card from the kitchen counter. Another recorded him returning it beside the cold-room panel. He had disabled the one camera that could show his hand touching the frosting, but not the cameras that showed how he reached it.
Emily’s phone was recovered from a locked linen cupboard.
On it were messages about Anna’s movements, the service doors, and the time Ethan’s special cake would be brought out.
By morning, a warrant had opened Victor’s financial records.
The postponement he wanted had not been about keeping money idle. Large withdrawals had gone into companies he controlled. Several payments had been concealed behind invoices for work the estate had never received.
The new trustees’ audit would have exposed them.
Dominic read the preliminary report at the library desk while Ethan slept on the sofa. He reached the figure at the bottom, then turned the page backward and read it again.
His brother had stolen from a child.
When discovery became inevitable, he had used the same child as an obstacle to be removed.
Anna stood in the doorway, Lily asleep against her shoulder.
