Chapter 6
The answer seemed obvious at first.
Because Lucy was adopted.
Vincent distrusted obvious answers now.
He asked Rebecca to map every major disagreement between Elena and Beatrice over the previous three years.
A pattern emerged.
Elena objected to a grant.
Beatrice questioned Lucy’s place at a family event.
Elena proposed independent oversight.
Beatrice challenged whether Elena should represent “future generations.”
Elena suggested merging two redundant charities.
Beatrice told another relative that Lucy could never understand Moretti legacy.
Every attack on Lucy followed an institutional challenge from Elena.
The child was not the subject of the conflict.
She was the lever.
Still, Beatrice’s ideology appeared sincere.
She genuinely believed biological descent mattered.
Several relatives confirmed she had spoken that way for decades.
Vincent remembered hearing it as a boy.
“Blood remembers.”
“Family protects blood.”
“The name belongs to those born into it.”
Old phrases.
Old rules.
He had ignored them because they sounded ceremonial.
Elena had not had that luxury once Lucy entered the family.
Then Rebecca discovered Beatrice had commissioned a legal memorandum two years earlier.
Topic:
Rights of adopted descendants under Moretti Foundation bylaws and state nonprofit law.
Vincent read the conclusion.
Adopted children could not lawfully be excluded from several benefit programs if the foundation’s published criteria used general terms such as “children and descendants” without explicit lawful distinctions.
More importantly, Elena’s parental status gave her full standing to advocate for Lucy regardless of biology.
Vincent looked up.
“She knew.”
Rebecca nodded.
“Two years ago.”
“So all her talk about ‘real heirs’—”
“Was not based on legal uncertainty.”
Elena leaned forward.
“She knew Lucy belonged.”
Clue number three.
Beatrice’s public language said Lucy did not count.
Her private legal advice told her the opposite.
That meant the blood argument was useful even when Beatrice knew it would fail legally.
Vincent finally understood what Part 10 would have to answer.
Not whether Beatrice believed adopted children were lesser.
May you like
She probably did.
The larger question was why she needed everyone else to keep arguing about that instead of looking somewhere else.
