Someone, she explained, had resurrected the tax credentials of a failed contracting company Silas had owned years ago — a business he’d closed under heavy debt, an old shame he had never told the family the full truth of — and used them to generate invoices for vendors that did not exist.

Silas had buried that bankruptcy out of embarrassment.

Dorian had known about it all along, and had turned his brother’s oldest wound into a weapon.

Linnea watched her brother-in-law’s hands tighten on the wheel and understood the particular cruelty of what Dorian had done to him, which was in its way as cold as anything he’d done to her.

Silas’s failed business was not a crime.

It was a young man’s mistake — a venture that had gone under, a debt paid off slowly and privately, a source of shame he had carried alone rather than burden the family with.