When Dad found the leak he didn’t ask questions. He found the paper trail—an email forwarded from an internal inbox, a scanned receipt slipped into an old file—and in the way fear moves, he filled in the blanks with the man he already hurt for loving me.
“You were with him,” he said the first time. Not a question. An indictment. His face had the hard set of a man who’d already chosen his verdict. “You left breadcrumbs. He sold you out. He used the only leverage he could—my name—and he traded me for his freedom.”
I could have explained. I could have told him the duffel at the pier, Box 42, the ledger, the Mercer lead. I could have told him how Dominic had walked into traps so we could pull wires back on the buyers. I could have told him the van, the fake badges, the way Dominic had let th
