We rehearsed statements. We printed timelines. Dominic paced and I watched him, wanting to reach out and stitch his nervousness into something calmer. He stopped and did something I didn’t expect: he laughed—soft, incredulous, bitter—and then he said, “Whatever happens, do not leave me in the dark again.”
“I never will,” I said. The vow felt honest but small in the face of a legal storm.
By mid-afternoon we were ready to bring the ledger fragments to Marisol. Her newsroom smelled of coffee and righteous anger. She greeted us like someone who’d been waiting for the perfunctory shove that allowed a story to become a hunt. We fed her the hashed files, the metadata, the list of servers and the chain we’d traced. She nodded with the kind of grim satisfaction that tastes like the start of a fi
