When we finally slowed, the hush between us felt like a pact. He lay with his head on my lap, fingers tracing idle circles on my hip. The ember of us glowed steady and private.
“Listen,” he said after a while, voice low. “I decrypted something last night. The 17-year clip—the timestamp’s a lie. Whoever sold that to the pavilion took raw footage and layered the hand. The file metadata says the clip was tampered with from a node that routes through a shell office in the docks. The same shell that’s linked to several of the buyers. It’s not just a frame — it’s an instruction. They wanted that image to feel personal.”
My stomach dropped at the word tampered. “So whoever did it wanted Dad to fall,” I breathed.
“He wanted a fracture,” Dominic agreed. “If Dad turns on me, we stop looking up th
