Alexandre AuClair was ten years old, and he wanted his father to name him the true heir of Larkspur Manor. His father was gone. He had left the estate ledgers to Alexandre, who had already caught an error in the grain column his father missed. Now Alexandre stood in the hall watching Monsieur Gaillard watch the silver cabinet. The steward was the man his father hired to keep the accounts. He wore a good coat and gold buttons, dressed above what a steward should. His eyes moved to the glass shelves of silver teapots and dishes, and they stayed there too long. Alexandre had no lock for the cabinet. He could not stand guard all day. His father would return and count the silver, and if a piece was missing, the blame would land on the boy who kept the house. He wrote it down, as his mother told him to, but writing did not stop a thief. He went to his mother. Madeleine AuClair kept the ledgers herself, though his father believed she only wrote letters. She was tall and auburn-haired, and she did not look up from her page when he spoke. "Gaillard watches the silver again," Alexandre said. "I can't guard it. I don't have a key." His mother set down her pen. "You don't need the silver." She turned a page in her ledger and pointed to a line. "He hid a receipt in the wrong column. Signed. It proves he took coin from the grain money." Alexandre stared at the figure. He had read past it a dozen times. "If he takes the silver, we lose one cabinet," she said. "If we show your father the receipt, we lose Gaillard." That evening, Louise Gaillard came to fit a gown. She was the steward's wife, a seamstress who moved through the AuClair rooms like she owned them. Her sharp eyes swept the hall and stopped on the cabinet, the same way her husband's did. "Beautiful silver," she said. "Wasted behind glass." Alexandre stepped between her and the cabinet, as he had once done to her husband. "My father counts every piece," he said. It was not true. He watched her face to see if she believed it. Louise held his eyes. "Then he is careful." She gathered her pins and left. Alexandre understood. She had come to see what he guarded. Now she would tell Gaillard the boy was watching, and Gaillard would move faster. He carried the ledger to his mother's desk. He copied the false receipt line onto clean paper, the date, the amount, the steward's own signature. He folded it and sealed it for his father. "I sent it," he told his mother the next morning. She nodded once. "Then it's done." The silver stayed in the cabinet. But Gaillard now knew he was hunted, and Alexandre's proof rode toward a father who had never yet called him heir.