They called it a scandal. They called it a sin. They called it every ugly name a small town keeps in a velvet box for the right occasion.
I woke up to my phone shivering. Notifications bloomed into a thousand tiny explosions: comments, tags, messages from strangers, messages from old classmates, a chain of screenshots from a forum I’d never seen before. The studio clip had hit three outlets by dawn. The buyers’ emails had leaked. The names on that blinking screen—citycouncil69, lakeevents_mgr, bigdonor_eddie—were already a litany of shame.
My father was quiet at breakfast in a way that made the china rattle. He ate mechanically, eyes on his coffee like it was a radio that would vomit the right frequency if he could only tune it.
Dominic didn’t sleep. He moved through the house with the
