A month was the length of a held breath.
No one saw Dominic. He’d disappeared the way a good story sometimes does—quiet, surgical, leaving only footprints you don’t notice until you’re trying to find the path in the dark. For four weeks the town ate rumors: prison, hospital, exile, dead in a ditch. The ledger’s echoes kept men busy and frightened; Julian bought silence in clotted, desperate checks. Dad kept the house tidy with the anxiousness of a man who had to look like control. Tyler kept showing up to places he shouldn’t and then, mysteriously, started showing up less.
And then Dominic came back like a tide with a new name.
He didn’t creep in on a motorcycle. He arrived in brass — a black sedan that smelled faintly of polish and something that whispered of money, flanked by two very
