We worked like running men. Files were compiled, backups made, affidavits prepared. We looped in a journalist—a woman with a reputation for not flinching—and we gave her proof: bank records, screenshots, a small mountain of transactions that spelled out a network of buyers.
At eleven fifty-eight, we pushed the file.
At midnight, headlines started to scream.
By one a.m., the town’s elite were in a meltdown of calls and threats. A lawyer’s car idled outside our house. The town f*******: page exploded. My father’s phone went off like a chorus of judgement.
At two a.m., someone rapped on the front door.
Dominic answered it with a force that shocked me. A man stood there, suit too thin, hair carefully wrong, a badge glinting in his hand.
“Sheriff Halloway,” he said. “We need to ask a few
