You come to her seventh birthday next month and you tell her about her mother because you knew Denise her whole life and I only got 12 years and my daughter is starving for every story about her mother she can get. Marcus's own eyes were wet. Now that's how you undo it. You stop trying to be cut out and you start showing up. That's the only way any of us undo anything.
When Marcus hung up at the phone 20 minutes later, Emma was standing across the room with both hands pressed over her mouth and tears streaming down her face, having heard only his half of it and understood all of it. "Marcus," she whispered. "What did you just do?" "I don't know," he said honestly, wiping his face. I think I either just ended a lawsuit or got played by a very good con man. Ruth's going to kill me for talking to him without a lawyer.
But it wasn't a con. At 8:15 the next morning, the deposition was scheduled for 9. Diane Okafor called Marcus and her voice had a stunned quality he'd never heard from her. Mr. Williams, Gerald Reyes's attorney just called mine. He's withdrawing the challenge.
All of it. Effective immediately. A pause. The attorney sounded confused. He said his client called him at 6:00 this morning and said, and I'm quoting, I'm done being a bitter old man.
Bill me for your hours and make it stop. Another pause. Mr. Williams, in 22 years of doing this, I have never seen a contested will collapse the night before deposition. What on earth did you do? Marcus looked across the kitchen at Emma, who was making breakfast, and at Viven, who had come downstairs in the suit Ruth had made her buy and was standing frozen with a coffee cup halfway to her mouth, having heard.
"I just talked to him," Marcus said, "like a person. Turns out that's all he needed." When he hung up and told them, Vivien sat down hard in a kitchen chair and started to cry. The deep, exhausted crying of someone who'd been braced for a fight and suddenly had the fight taken away. And Emma went to her and held her. And Marcus stood in his own kitchen at 8:30 in the morning and felt the ground, which had been shaking under him for a month, finally go still.
Then Ruth called. He'd texted her the news. She called back within 90 seconds, and Marcus braced himself because he had, in fact, done exactly the thing she'd have told him never to do. Negotiated directly with the opposing party the night before a deposition with no lawyer on the phone. You spoke to him," Ruth said.
"No greeting." I did. I know I wasn't supposed to. Marcus. Ruth's voice stopped him. In 31 years, do you know how many times I watched a lawyer make one of these things worse.
Everybody wants to fight. Everybody wants to win. Depositions, motions, billable hours. And half the time, the whole thing is just two grieving people who never got to say the thing they needed to say. A pause.
And when she spoke again, her voice was thick in a way Marcus had never heard from her. You did in one phone call. What a courtroom couldn't have done in a year. You didn't beat him. You freed him.
There's a difference. And most people never learn it. Another pause. Denise chose a good man. I'm glad my daughter had the sense to see it, too, even if it took her 4 years.
Marcus had to sit down. The birthday party was 3 weeks later, and it was the strangest, fullest, most unlikely gathering Marcus had ever hosted. Lily turned seven in the backyard of the house on Cloverfield Lane, and the guest list would have been impossible to imagine 2 months earlier. Renee was there with her kids. Robert Patterson manned the grill, of course, narrating.
Patricia Haynes brought potato salad with instructions on storage. Ruth held court from a lawn chair, like visiting royalty. Emma moved through all of it like she'd always belonged there because at this point she had. And then around 2:00, a car neither Lily nor anyone else recognized pulled up to the curb and an old man got out slowly holding a wrapped present too big for the child it was for and stood at the edge of the yard like he wasn't sure he was allowed in. Gerald Reyes Marcus walked over to him.
The two men had never met in person. They looked at each other for a the man Gerald had tried to destroy in a courtroom and the man who' talked him out of it and neither of them quite knew what to do. Then Gerald said, "I brought her a bicycle. I didn't know if she had one. Do kids still ride bicycles?" "She's been asking for one for a year," Marcus said.
I kept saying, "Next year." Gerald's face broke into something between a smile and a sob. Then I got it right. First thing I've gotten right in a long time. Marcus put a hand on the old man's shoulder and walked him into the yard and he found Lily and he crouched down beside her and he said, "Bug, there's somebody I want you to meet. This is your great uncle Gerald.
He knew your mommy her whole life since she was a baby, even littleer than you." Lily looked up at the old man with those enormous, serious eyes. You knew my mommy when she was little. Gerald lowered himself down onto one knee. Slowly, his old joints protesting. I did.
I used to give her horsey rides on my back. She used to pull my hair. She was the funniest little girl in the whole world. Just like his voice caught, just like I bet you are. Will you tell me stories about her?
Lily's whole body leaned toward him. Aunt Vivien tells me some, but she only knows the ones Grandma Carol told her. You'd know the real ones, the ones you saw. Gerald Reyes, 71 years old, who three weeks earlier had been trying to erase this child's new family in a courtroom, knelt in the grass of a stranger's backyard and looked at his grand niece and said, "I will tell you every story I have. For as long as you want to hear them, I promise you that." And Marcus stood up and stepped back and watched his daughter who two months ago had asked him if she was going to run out of people sit down in the grass beside a great uncle she'd never met next to an aunt with her mother's eyes surrounded by neighbors and a woman he was going to marry and a mother-in-law to be who'd gone to war for her.