Marcus Littlejohn was a man who fixed things. Cars, mostly—eight hours a day in a garage off Eastside Boulevard, grease under his nails, a daughter's drawing taped to his toolbox. He paid his rent. He coached Little League. He kept his head down. He was not a man who made trouble.Then the police raided the wrong apartment.A corrupt operation. An unarmed man killed in his own doorway. And a stray bullet that traveled through a thin wall and found eight-year-old Keisha Littlejohn doing math homework at her kitchen table.The city calls it a tragic accident. Offers fifty thousand dollars and a folded flag. The officers get paid leave. The neighborhood gets a curfew. And Marcus gets a choice: take the money and disappear, or stand up and find out why his daughter's death doesn't matter to anyone but him.What he discovers is worse than murder. It's business.Captain Vince Deluca has been running the Eastside like a personal empire—fake raids, seized property, arrests fed to a private prison pipeline, all of it greased by developers who write checks while the community writes obituaries. The unarmed man was an accountant who asked too many questions. Keisha was a child who saw too much. And the system that killed them both isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed.Armed with nothing but his daughter's notebook, a journalist burning out on her last story, a reverend who remembers when "standing on business" meant defending your people, and a young cop who can't live with the silence, Marcus begins to take the machine apart. Not with a gun. With patience. With proof. With the same methodical hands that rebuilt engines, now rebuilding a case the city buried before the body was cold.But the streets don't forgive a man who lifts the hood. The threats come quietly at first—vandalism, harassment, a traffic stop that isn't about traffic. Then they come loud. And Marcus must decide how much more he's willing to lose for a truth that won't bring his daughter back.Standing on Business is a novel about grief that refuses to become rage, about a father's love that outlasts the bullet, and about what it really means to defend your territory when the enemy wears a badge. It's the story of a man who was never looking for a fight—until the fight came to his kitchen table.Some losses you don't get over. Some losses you stand on.---For readers of The Hate U Give, Between the World and Me, and anyone who has ever wondered what justice looks like when the system is the crime.