Elena noticed things. It was her curse.
She'd been the Dean of the Business School — a woman whose entire career was built on reading rooms, managing egos, and detecting patterns at a hundred paces. She wasn't warm about it. She wasn't the nurturing type. She was a surgeon — precise, clinical, and quietly terrifying in a way that made faculty members straighten their posture when she walked past. On vacation, she couldn't turn it off. She noticed that Victoria's competitiveness had a tell — she went silent before she struck. She noticed that Isabella's drama was precisely calibrated for maximum attention with minimum effort. She noticed that Song Mei's serenity was real, not performed, which made it the most dangerous thing about her.
And she noticed things about La Casita de Mila that no one else thought to look at.
