The town breathed hard and the breathing came out in subpoenas.
The week after the courthouse fireworks was a blur of men in suits with shiny folders and reporters with sharper teeth. Julian’s name was everywhere, but so was his money’s counterattack — a legal tide that licked at every exposed shore. He sued to freeze files, to gag outlets, to call everything a smear campaign. The ledger we’d set alight was now a living thing with teeth; the more we pulled, the more it snapped back.
They hit back where it hurt: narrative. Overnight, an edited clip of Dominic with a woman who was not me — cropped, cut, given a headline and sold to every hungry feed — arrived like a bullet. It implied motives, intimacy out of context, consent twisted into suggestion. The comments came in a tsunami: accusat
