
As the household staff began carefully clearing the scattered crystal fragments from the marble floor, Rosa knelt down near the base of the destroyed chandelier, something catching her attention among the debris that made her pause entirely. Half-hidden beneath a cluster of broken crystal shards sat a pair of pliers, distinctly out of place among the wreckage, their metal edges glinting faintly in the morning light. Rosa's stomach tightened as she stared at them, a slow, uneasy realization beginning to take shape in her mind. Chandeliers didn't simply fall on their own, not without warning, not without some kind of structural failure that would have shown signs well before that morning. But pliers, conveniently discarded near a severed support chain, told an entirely different story — one that suggested this hadn't been an accident at all. She reached down carefully, lifting the tool just enough to examine it more closely, her mind racing through the implications of what she was looking at. Someone had been up near that chandelier's mounting recently, and whoever it was hadn't left behind proper maintenance equipment. They'd left behind evidence. Rosa's foot shifted slightly as she stood, her decisive step landing firmly beside the scattered glass, her expression hardening with a mixture of suspicion and dawning dread. She glanced up toward the group still gathered near Emily and Richard, her eyes moving carefully across each face, searching for any flicker of guilt or unease that might betray the truth behind what had very nearly become a tragedy. Whatever had happened here, Rosa understood with sudden, chilling clarity that it had been deliberate, and that meant someone in that foyer had wanted Emily gone badly enough to risk her life and the life of her unborn child.