The Name on the Receipt

By Tristan McGowan

Devin Diaz thought he understood the difference between authorship and authority.

Years before SearchGlass, Devin and Tessa Ibarra helped build WitnessMark, an ordinary college project meant to preserve limited history about community media. Devin moved on. Tessa kept maintaining it. Other people kept trusting it. And Devin's name remained embedded in the receipts.

Now a tenants' cooperative is fighting a redevelopment that could scatter families and erase hard-won protections. A damaging recording appears to show Andre Greene-Devin's former closest friend-negotiating with the people on the other side. Its WitnessMark receipt carries one dangerously simple word: verified.

Andre wants Devin to declare the recording false. The cooperative needs to know what the receipt can support. Devin can honestly do neither.

As the dispute pulls him back toward Tessa, organizer Celeste Wynn, resident Owen Price, and the promises he abandoned, Devin discovers that precise disclaimers can cause damage of their own. Every attempt to define the limits of his authority gives his judgment more weight. Every delay costs people whose homes, work, privacy, and standing are already at risk.

With SearchGlass scrutinizing his outside involvement and the cooperative refusing to let his personal reckoning become its purpose, Devin must decide what responsibility remains when ownership and permission are gone.

The recording cannot supply a clean answer. Neither can the technology.

But the name on the receipt still belongs to him. The Name on the Receipt is the second Shadows and Bytes novel: a near-future technological thriller about friendship, housing, evidence, and the difficult work of accepting responsibility without turning it into control.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H8QJRBGB
• ISBN13: 9798187064168
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 824 Pages
• Weight: 2.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"