The thing Rodrigo Mendes had been building arrived not from the press and not from the legal world but from inside the Vasconcelos board, which was where Paulo had always said the real play would come from.
It arrived on a Tuesday — it was always a Tuesday, Camila had begun to think the week had a specific grievance — in the form of a document delivered to three board members simultaneously: a comprehensive review of the Vasconcelos estate proceedings, the custody arrangements, and the surrogacy contract, annotated with questions that were framed as governance concerns.
The document asked, in the polished language of corporate risk assessment, whether the personal situation of the company's chief executive represented a material risk to the September contract negotiations. Whether the on
