On the cold bathroom tiles of the Vale mansion, eight-year-old Eloin Vale sat with her tiny hands trembling. Her bare feet were numb against the marble. Blonde hair fell out in soft clumps around her like dead petals. In front of her, Miss Calva froze, her pale eyes widening. The hairbrush slipped from the woman’s fingers and hit the floor with a sharp clack. Behind them, a man in a thousand-dollar suit stood in the doorway. Ariston Vale, Eloin’s father, stared as if the world had just ended. The color drained from his face. His jaw dropped. He looked like a man who had just seen a ghost.
Before anyone moved, before anyone breathed, everything that had brought them to this moment hung between them like a storm cloud. Years of choices, signatures, and willful blindness pressed in on the room.
Before we get to what the doctor would later find buried in Eloin’s scalp, you have to understand how things got this bad.