Chapter 6 - Clara’s Last Weeks
Cesare began rebuilding Clara’s final months one ordinary detail at a time.
Credit card receipts.
Calendar appointments.
Workroom access logs.
Emails preserved by the company.
Nothing appeared dramatic alone.
Together they told a different story.
Clara had noticed vendor costs rising while productions were shrinking.
She had asked accounting employees questions.
She requested copies of invoices.
She compared stage freight charges against actual tour dates.
Then she stopped asking questions through company email.
Instead, she printed documents.
Old-fashioned paper.
The same kind of paper she later folded into flowers.
Cesare understood why.
Someone had access to her digital account.
Margaret found that several of Clara’s finance-related messages had been deleted before her death.
Not archived.
Deleted.
One recovered draft contained only an incomplete note to Cesare saying she needed to show him something before the next trust meeting.
She never sent it.
During the same period, Vanessa became increasingly involved in Julian’s schedule.
She accompanied him to lender meetings.
She controlled which papers reached his desk.
Ethan’s investment fund extended Romano Stageworks a short-term credit facility carrying unusually aggressive default provisions.
If the company missed certain targets, Ethan’s group could acquire valuable production assets at a discount.
The strange vendor payments were therefore doing two things at once.
They were stealing cash.
And they were making Romano Stageworks look weaker.
The weaker the company became, the more dependent Julian became on the Coles’ financing.
Cesare finally understood the elegance of it.
They were not simply robbing the company.
They were draining it until Julian willingly handed them control.
Clara had noticed.
Vanessa had noticed Clara noticing.
And Julian had been too desperate to admit either possibility.
That afternoon, Cesare watched preserved hallway footage from the day the flower box disappeared.
At 10:18 a.m., Rosa carried laundry from Elsie’s nursery.
At 10:23, Vanessa entered the nursery.
At 10:31, she walked out carrying nothing visible.
At 10:34, Ethan entered.
He remained inside for six minutes.
When he left, his blazer was buttoned despite the warm house.
The flower box vanished sometime during those thirteen minutes.
But one flower had survived.
Elsie had been carrying it around the mansion for days.
The one Vanessa apparently missed.
The one she grabbed from Elsie in the rehearsal room and tore during the confrontation.
The one that exposed the blue stamp.
Cesare realized something else.
If Clara had hidden financial evidence inside an entire box of flowers, Vanessa and Ethan had probably destroyed most of it.
But people who destroyed evidence usually made one mistake.
May you like
They focused on the evidence they knew existed.
Clara might have left something they never knew about.
