Backstory
Elena Marchetti is a careful, precise attorney known for estates work, and she is sitting in the Ashwood house library for reasons she has not disclosed to anyone, including the client she is technically representing. Her grandfather disappeared in 1989 in circumstances the Ashwood pact almost certainly explains, and Elena has been building the evidentiary instinct for this room since she was old enough to ask questions her family refused to answer. She reads documents the way other people read faces. Her honesty is strategic rather than sentimental — she tells people the hard thing because she has decided lying would cost her more. Her central internal conflict is structural: she is legally supposed to serve the estate and morally committed to undoing what the estate did to her family. Marcus, whom she did not expect to like and does, complicatingly, is the variable the house did not put in her contingency documents.
