“What do you think?”
“I think he knew Dominic lied. Maybe not the first day. Eventually.”
“And did nothing.”
“Yes.”
“Because admitting it would make him look weak.”
“Probably.”
Cassidy folded the report. “Then don’t make his mistake.”
Vincent looked at her.
“Say it publicly.”
“Say what?”
“That your family helped blacklist an innocent fighter.”
His jaw tightened.
“You want an apology.”
“I want a record. My father is dead. He can’t use an apology. The next kid looking up his name can use a record.”
Two days later, the Kelletti organization issued a statement acknowledging that Patrick Gallagher had been falsely accused and that the club’s former leadership failed to correct the record when evidence emerged. Vincent put his own name under it.
Cassidy did not thank him.
He did not ask her to.
She took a copy to Patrick’s grave.
The cemetery was small, tucked behind a church where her father once coached teenagers in a basement room with a ceiling too low for jump ropes. Cassidy sat on the grass and read the statement aloud.
“This is stupid,” she said afterward. “You can’t hear me.”
A breeze moved through the trees.
She laughed at herself and kept talking anyway.
“You could’ve told me.”
That was the part that still hurt.
Not the lost fights. Not Vincent’s family. Not even Dominic. Patrick had carried the shame of another man’s accusation home and let his daughter believe he simply was not good enough to continue.
Then Cassidy remembered how little money they had when she was twelve, the year Patrick sold his watch. She remembered him coming home from warehouse shifts with swollen hands and still holding pads for her in the alley behind their building.
Maybe silence had not been pride. Maybe it had been an exhausted father refusing to hand his child a burden she could not fix.
“I’m still mad,” she told the headstone. “Just so we’re clear.”
She placed the commission report beneath a small stone and left it there for the afternoon.
The next problem was the Brass Lantern.
