Twenty-four hours after the first whisper, the household woke to a different kind of hush.

The phone on Father’s desk had not stopped ringing all night. When a message came through, it slid across the room like a blade — Edward Harrington was dead; he had been found in his study alone, collapsed over his papers.

The silence that followed wasn’t grief. It was calculation.

Father stood at the window, his hand gripping the edge of the curtain, watching nothing and everything at ...