29. DOMINIC
Ingrid doesn’t ask my permission before she visits Piper.
She simply tells me, afterward, the way she tells me most things I wouldn’t have agreed to in advance.
“I went to see her,” she says over the phone, and my whole body goes tense before she’s finished the sentence.
“Don’t panic. I didn’t go to defend you. I went because I wanted to see the woman my brother nearly destroyed his own life over, and because I thought she deserved to hear a few things from someone who isn’t you.”
“Ingrid—”
“I told her you didn’t lie because she meant nothing to you.”
Her voice is steady, clinical almost, the tone she uses to deliver hard news to frightened families in a trauma bay.
“I told her you lied because she was the first person in twelve years you didn’t know how to survive losing. That’s not an excuse, Dominic. I made sure she understood that distinction clearly. It’s an explanation.”
I don’t have anything to say to that, mostly because it’s true, and my sister has an infuriating habit of being most right exactly when I have the least capacity to argue with her.
“How did she seem?”
“Tired. Furious in the way people get when the fury’s the only thing keeping them upright.”
A pause.
“She didn’t ask about you, if that’s what you’re really asking. But she didn’t tell me to leave either. I think that’s worth something, even if I can’t tell you how much.”
Something loosens slightly in my chest at that detail, small and probably meaningless, and I hold onto it anyway, because I don’t currently have very much else worth holding onto.
I thank her, quietly, and end the call, and then I go back to the file Hayes flagged an hour before Ingrid called, the reason, if I’m honest, I hadn’t answered her call the moment it came in.
The archive search finally turned up something I’ve been afraid to find for twelve years and desperate to find for the last six weeks: a secondary set of records from the firm Roman used to monitor the Merrick family, cross-referenced against the exact week Jonah died.
Wire transfers.
Communications logs.
And buried three folders deep, a single address: the safe house I personally selected for Jonah’s relocation, the one location I never shared with anyone outside a two-person chain of trust that included, at the time, exactly one other person.
Roman had it.
Roman had the address four days before the men who killed Jonah arrived at that exact location.
I read the file three times, testing it, refusing to believe something this large without absolute confirmation.
There’s no ambiguity left once I cross-reference the timestamps.
Roman didn’t simply tell me Jonah was unreliable and let me make a bad decision based on flawed information.
Roman knew where I was moving him, and he gave that address to the exact people who needed it to finish what they’d started.
I sit with that for a long time, feeling something enormous and complicated settle into the space where twelve years of guilt used to live uncontested.
I made a devastating mistake.
That much has never changed, and I don’t think it ever will.
I trusted Roman’s judgment over my own instincts, I moved a man who told me, in his own words, that something dangerous was happening, and I didn’t listen closely enough to the fear underneath his warning.
That failure is mine.
But I am not the sole architect of what happened to him.
Roman didn’t simply exploit a mistake I was always going to make.
He built the conditions for it, engineered my trust in his judgment over years of patient manipulation, and then handed the men who killed Jonah the exact address I’d chosen to keep him safe.
I have believed for twelve years that I murdered a man through negligence.
Tonight I understand, for the first time, that I made a mistake a manipulator specifically engineered me to make, which does not absolve me of the mistake, but does, finally, correct the scale of what I’ve been carrying.
Both truths sit side by side, uneasy, refusing to cancel each other out the way I keep wanting them to.
I am responsible for my choice.
Roman is responsible for building the trap that made the choice inevitable.
Neither fact makes the other one smaller.
I call Hayes back, tell him to secure the file through three separate channels before Roman’s people can find a way to scrub it, and then I sit alone in the quiet of my own diminished practice, feeling something I haven’t felt in twelve years and don’t entirely trust yet.
Something almost like room to breathe.
I think of Ingrid’s sentence, the one she said to Piper instead of me, the first person he did not know how to survive losing, and I understand that it was never really about excusing anything.
It was about giving Piper one true fact to weigh against everything Roman handed her, before she decided, permanently, what to do with the rest.
Whether it’s enough, I still don’t know.
I only know that for the first time since the chapel, I have something in my hands worth bringing to her that isn’t another apology.
I call Ingrid back before I do anything else with the file, because some part of me needs to say the next part out loud to someone before I let myself believe it.
“I found proof Roman gave the killers Jonah’s address,” I tell her. “He didn’t just steer me toward a bad decision. He made sure the decision I made was lethal, regardless of what I chose.”
My voice shakes slightly delivering the sentence, twelve years of careful composure finally cracking under the weight of saying it plainly to someone who actually loves me.
Ingrid is quiet for a long moment.
“How does that feel to know?”
“Complicated. I keep waiting for it to feel like relief, and it mostly just feels like grief wearing a different shape. I spent twelve years believing I was the reason he died. Now I know someone else built the trap. It doesn’t undo the mistake. It just means I wasn’t the only architect of it.”
“That’s not nothing, Dominic.”
“No,” I agree, quietly. “It’s not nothing. It’s just not everything either. I still made the call. I still trusted the wrong man’s judgment over my own instincts, and Jonah still paid for that with his life, whatever Roman added on top of it.”
“You’re allowed to hold both of those at once. You don’t have to choose between being responsible and being manipulated. Most real tragedies are built out of exactly that combination.”
Her voice softens, the gentleness she reserves only for me.
“Go finish building your case against him. And when this is over, however it’s over, go find out if she’ll let you say any of this to her directly. Not through me. Through you.”
“I don’t know if she will.”
“No,” Ingrid agrees. “But you won’t know until you try, and I think you’ve spent quite enough of this year deciding things on her behalf without asking first.”
I sit with the observation a long moment after we hang up, and understand that my sister has just handed me, in one sentence, the entire blueprint for everything I’ve been doing wrong since this began.