The room went quiet.

What Silas did in that boardroom took a courage Linnea would respect for the rest of her life, because he did it knowing it might not save him.

He could have stayed silent about his old bankruptcy and gambled that the forensic audit would eventually clear him.

That would have been the safe play.

Instead he stood in front of the board of his family’s company and volunteered the very secret Dorian had counted on his hiding — said, out loud, I failed at a business, I hid the debt out of shame, and my shame is what let my brother frame me. He handed the room the exact ammunition that could have been used against him, because he understood, the way Linnea had understood about her photographs, that a secret is only a weapon while it stays secret.

Dorian’s whole frame depended on Silas’s bankruptcy being a hidden thing that, once discovered, would look like proof of a guilty pattern.