Chapter 8
I met with Dominic in person for the first time two weeks later, in a quiet back room of a restaurant in the North End that, he told me without elaborating, had once been a regular stop of my mother's decades ago.
"I've been thinking about what you told me," I said, once the twins' portable bassinet was settled beside my chair and the room was otherwise empty except for the two of us. "About lines. About Cole crossing one."
"I remember."
"I don't want protection anymore. Not the kind where you handle everything and I find out about it after. I want a plan I'm part of." I met his eyes and made myself hold the look, the way my mother apparently had, decades ago, in an emergency room full of people who'd already given up. "You said Cole cares about a specific redevelopment deal on that block. What if instead of hiding from him, I make sure everyone who matters — the DA, the press, whoever's backing that redevelopment — knows exactly what he tried to do to get it? Not through you. Through the legitimate case Alicia's already building."
Dominic studied me for a long moment. "You want to use the law against him instead of letting me handle it my way."
"I want both," I said honestly. "I'm not naive about what protected me the night that man came to my door. But I also don't want my children growing up in a story where their mother only survived because someone else fought her battles for her. I want Cole to lose this specific deal, publicly, provably, because he broke actual laws trying to steal from a woman he assumed had no one to protect her. I want it on the record. I want it to matter to people who aren't in your world."
Something shifted in Dominic's expression — not quite a smile, but close to respect. "Your mother used to argue with me exactly like this. I'd offer to help the restaurant with a supplier problem once, early on, and she told me she'd rather struggle honestly than owe anyone something she couldn't repay in kind."
"What did you do?"
"I stopped offering to fix her problems for her. I offered information instead, when she wanted it, and let her decide what to do with it." He allowed himself the smallest smile. "It seems her daughter inherited the preference."
He asked, at one point, whether I was afraid of what going public might cost me — whether I understood that once the story was out, there'd be no taking it back, no quiet version of my life to retreat to if it went badly. I told him I'd already lost the version of my life where things stayed quiet and safe; that version had ended with a text message about Cabo. What I hadn't had, until now, was any say in what replaced it.
He nodded slowly, like that was the answer he'd been waiting to hear before he'd agree to help me build it his way instead of simply handling it for me. "Your mother would have said something almost exactly like that," he said. "She had a way of making people feel foolish for underestimating her, without ever raising her voice to do it."
We spent the next hour building something closer to a real plan than protection alone: Alicia would formally file the fraud case against Bradley, with the Salem Street intimidation attached as an aggravating pattern implicating Cole's associates, and would make sure a specific, careful version of the story reached a reporter at the Globe who'd covered redevelopment corruption before — not the parts involving Dominic, which stayed exactly where they belonged, in the private ledger of an old debt between two families, but the parts that were mine to tell: a pregnant woman abandoned and defrauded by her husband, targeted afterward by loan sharks trying to steal her mother's legacy out from under her.
"Cole's business partners in that redevelopment deal are legitimate people," Dominic said. "People with reputations to protect, licenses to keep, investors to answer to. The moment this becomes public — a sympathetic new mother, a documented fraud case, intimidation at her front door — they will not want their names anywhere near Victor Cole. That will hurt him far more than anything I could do quietly ever would."
"Then that's what we do," I said. "Publicly. Legally. On my terms."
It wasn't the plan of a woman waiting to be rescued. It was the plan of a woman who'd finally understood that the story of her own life belonged to her to tell, and who intended to tell it in a way that would leave her enemies with nowhere left to hide — not in the shadows Dominic operated in, and not in the daylight either.
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