Blake didn’t know about Dawn. No one did. I’d gone from assuaging my guilt by giving money to the family to being blackmailed by Dawn. I was being squeezed like a piece of fruit. The small profits generated by the Pig had been mostly going to the Steiner family. What had started as a fun project with friends and a bit of a tax shelter—own a business, brew some beer—had turned into a wellspring for guilt and blackmail money. And now Dawn wanted a big, fat chunk I didn’t have.

And none of the money I’d given them had lifted the burden of guilt I carried. I still saw the accident in my dreams, still saw Maggie Steiner’s face. . . .

“People do good things for strangers every day,” I said. “It’s not an aberration.”

But Blake rambled on.

“The lucky thing for you is that Aaron couldn’t remember much of anything from that night,” Blake said. “He was wasted, and then he bashed his head so hard against the steering wheel, he was concussed, so the whole night was a blur. He knew he’d been at Sigil and Shield, which meant a one-year suspension for the club. We all had the fear of God put into us by the dean. I remember that.” He shook his head at the memory. “They chose to come down on the whole club rather than individuals. After all, Aaron wasn’t actually a member. . . .”

“We were lucky they didn’t,” I said.

“Damn right. I remember you holding your breath all the way up to graduation. You were so worried they were going to jump on us, expel us, and not let us get our degrees. Man, you were obsessed with covering your ass. ‘What if my mom finds out the truth? What about all the sacrifices she made for my education after my dad died? She went back to school. She became a teacher.’”

“Yeah, I know. I was scared.”

“Everybody knows who was in the car that night. It was in the papers. So if a reporter really wanted to dig deeper into those gifts to the Steiners, they could.”

“The reporter called you and me. You know that. And we both told them the same thing—we didn’t know about the money.”

“They’d have to subpoena bank records to really prove anything. And who wants to do that?”

“It’s in the past,” I said. “Aaron did his time.”