I want to establish, for the record, that I had a plan.
A good one. Clean, structured, colour-coded. Three sub-plans with contingencies. Priya had the legal architecture. Patricia had the audit trail. Simone had the narrative. Everything was calibrated, documented, and moving in the correct sequence.
I want to establish this because what happened on Saturday night and Sunday morning was approximately forty percent plan and sixty percent the specific category of chaos that arrived when you were dealing with Eleanor Cole, who had spent sixty-one years learning that the best way to survive a corner was to make the corner someone else's problem.
She was trying to make it Damien's problem.
He was sitting at my mother's kitchen table at seven fifty-five PM looking at the space above the tabl
