“You should have kept your mouth shut,” I told her, my eyes tracing the clean, looping signature of my cousin **Dominic Corvino** beside Arya’s elegant script. “Dominic isn’t a businessman who plays by municipal codes. If he thinks you intercepted this, you won’t just lose your hourly wage.”
Tessa turned off the faucet with a sharp twist of her wrist. She dried her hands on a rough paper towel and leaned against the counter, folding her arms.
“My sister spent six months in an intensive care unit after an industrial accident,” she said, her voice completely flat. “I know what vultures look like when they circle a hospital bed. I didn’t take this case to watch an execution.”
“Call Patel,” I said.
“I already did. From the payphone at the gas station down the block. He’s coming through the garden gate at three-fifteen. He’s leaving his marked clinic van around the corner.”
I looked at the folded petition on my knees. Dominic was my blood. When his father died in a shipyard crane collapse thirty years ago, my mother had laid an extra plate at our dinner table every night for ten years. I had given him five percent of the maritime firm on his thirtieth birthday. I had treated him like an extension of my own arm.
