The call to whoever Alexander trusted with tracing money happened two days later, behind a closed door, in a language Elena didn't fully understand, full of terms about routing numbers and shell accounts that meant nothing to her but clearly meant everything to him. She didn't ask to sit in on it. Some things, she was learning, he still needed to hold onto himself, at least for now.
She found him afterward in the small garden behind the manor, a part of the house she hadn't spent much time in yet, tucked away from the main windows where nobody watching from the road could see him standing without the wheelchair, walking slow, careful circles around a stone fountain that had clearly seen better decades.
"You're not supposed to be out here without the act," Elena said, coming up beside him
