I intend to marry you, Emma. Not tonight. Not this month. We'll do it right. We'll do it when the dust settles and Lily's ready.
And I found a ring that isn't an insult to you. But I'm not sitting on a feeling. Not anymore. Your mother's right. Four years is long enough for both of us to have wasted.
Emma was crying now openly. And Ruth was sitting at the head of the table with the smallest, most satisfied smile Marcus had ever seen. The smile of a woman who had asked exactly the right question and gotten exactly the answer she wanted. "Well," Ruth said, folding the legal letter and setting it aside like the minor inconvenience she'd apparently decided it was. "Good, now that that's settled," she stood up.
We've got a lawsuit to win and a wedding to plan, and I intend to be alive for both, so let's not waste any more time. Emma put the kettle on. Marcus, get me a legal pad. We're not going to bed until this Gerald situation has a plan with teeth in it. And they didn't.
They sat in that kitchen until nearly 1:00 in the morning. Three people and a legal pad and a pot of tea building the wall that would protect the little girl sleeping two houses down. And somewhere in the middle of it, Marcus looked up and caught Emma looking at him. And neither of them said anything. But they didn't need to because the whole conversation was already in her eyes.
3 weeks earlier, he'd been a man afraid to let anyone through the door. Now he was sitting in a war room built out of love, engaged to a woman he'd been too scared to notice being defended by a mother-in-law. He hadn't married yet. All of them circled up around a child who had just gotten her mother's eyes back in the form of an aunt. His story wasn't already written.
It was he was starting to understand only just getting started. And Gerald Reyes, whoever he was, had no idea what he'd just walked into. The deposition was set for a Tuesday morning in October. And Ruth spent the two weeks leading up to it, turning Marcus' dining room into what Lily started calling the war table. Ruth was there almost every evening.
Now, she'd have Marcus drive her over after dinner, and she'd sit at the head of the table with her reading glasses and her legal pads and a thermos of the coffee. She wasn't supposed to drink at night, and she'd walk Marcus and Vivien through every question Gerald's lawyer might ask over and over until the answers came out clean. "He's going to try to rattle you," Ruth told Viven one night, 3 days before the deposition. Viven had driven down and was staying in Marcus' guest room. And the two women had taken to each other in a way that surprised everyone.
He's going to imply you targeted Carol. He's going to ask about money in a way that makes any answer sound greedy. Do you understand what he's doing? Viven nodded, but her hands were shaking around her coffee cup. Say it back to me, Ruth said.
Not unkindly, but firm. He's trying to make me look like I planned it, Vivien said quietly. Like I found Carol on purpose for the money. And did you? No.
I spent 20 years looking for my birth mother because I wanted to know where I came from. I didn't even know Carol had money until the lawyer told me after she died. Then that's your answer every time. Ruth reached over and put her hand over Viven's shaking one. You don't dress it up.
You don't get emotional. You don't defend yourself like you're guilty. You just tell the truth flat and let it sit there. The truth doesn't need help, baby. It just needs you not to flinch.
Marcus, watching from across the table, thought about how many nights this woman must have done this over 31 years, sat across from frightened people, and taught them how to stand inside their own truth without shaking. He thought about how she'd never mentioned any of it, not once in 5 years of being the sharp- tonged neighbor with opinions about dishwashers. and he thought about how much a person can carry quietly, how much any of us might be carrying unseen by the people right next door. Emma came in from the kitchen with a plate of the cookies Lily had insisted on baking for the meeting. And she sat them down and slid into the chair beside Marcus. And under the table, her hand found his knee and squeezed once, which was their signal now.
It meant I'm here. It meant breathe. It meant a hundred things that didn't need words anymore. "How's she doing?" Emma murmured, nodding at Viven. "Ruth's putting steel in her." Marcus murmured back.
"By Tuesday, she'll be able to face down a firing squad." "That's my mother," Emma smiled. Then the smile faded a little. "Marcus, can I ask you something about Tuesday?" "Anything. What happens if it goes wrong?" Her voice was low just for him. What if the judge I know mama says he's bluffing and I believe her, but what if he's not?
What if a judge decides Vivian's contact with Lily has to stop while it drags out Lily's already attached? She talks about her everyday. What do we tell her if Marcus didn't have an answer for that and he didn't pretend to? I don't know, he admitted. I've been trying not to think about it, but if it happens, we handle it the way you told me at the start.
We can't stop her from feeling it. We just make sure she's not alone when she does. He turned his hand over and laced his fingers through Emma's. Same as always. Same as we do everything now.
It turned out he was right to worry, but wrong about where the danger would come from. The night before the deposition at 9:45, Marcus' phone rang with a number he didn't recognize. He almost let it go. Something made him answer. Is this Marcus Williams?