It took a little over ten minutes before Jacob Lane—the man everyone in the village still instinctively called by his old nickname, plain and unadorned—pushed open the creaking wooden door and stepped back inside. His boots carried traces of dust and gravel from the uneven village roads, and his breathing was still slightly uneven, as if he had hurried the entire way back.
In his hand, he carried the remaining cash.
It wasn’t much, really. When one broke it down, the numbers seemed almost laughably small in the grand scheme of things—two thousand borrowed from one household, four thousand from another, bits and pieces accumulated over time like small cracks in a wall that eventually became impossible to ignore. Added together, the total came to just over thirty thousand. Barely enough to
