They said the town would split. They didn’t say how clean the shards would be.
For a week the world had been a sequence of small victories and bigger threats—ledgers published, donors shamed, a mayor’s assistant unspooled, Evelyn in cuffs, Mark Hollis running for cover. For the first time since this started, I let myself believe the worst of it might be ending. Dominic had been off the grid for days—doing the dangerous, invisible work he always did—while Dad and I tried to stitch a normal together. We argued less. We planned more. We took fake smiles out into the sunshine and pretended we could be ordinary.
Then Marisol called a special town meeting at the pavilion: one last public airing, she said, to finish the clean sweep. “I have leads,” she promised, “and an exclusive.” Dad insisted
