"I'm glad you came," she said. "To dinner and today." He thought about what to say. He landed on the true thing. "Me, too," he said. He drove away.
He did not look in the rearview mirror this time. He was making progress. Two weeks into the farmhouse project, Cedar Falls began to talk. It started the way small town talk always starts, not with a conversation, but with an observation. Someone saw Marcus's truck at the Caldwell property two days running.
Someone else mentioned seeing Emily Caldwell at the hardware store on the east side of town, the one Marcus used buying specific materials and asking specific questions. By itself, none of this was remarkable. But Cedar Falls was a town that operated on the connection of dots, and the dot that stood out most was simple and unmistakable. A struggling black single father was spending significant time with the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the state. People began to form opinions the way they always did, quickly, firmly, and without much information.
At the barber shop on Tanner Street, the consensus arrived within a week. Marcus Williams was working an angle. Nobody said it cruy. Exactly. Some of them even said it with a kind of admiring acknowledgement.
The way people talk about cleverness, they wouldn't have thought of themselves. But the implication was clear. Marcus had seen an opportunity and taken it. His friend Darnell, who ran the hardware store and had known Marcus for 15 years, heard these conversations and reported them back to Marcus on a Thursday afternoon with the tone of someone delivering bad news they'd rather not be delivering. "People are talking," Darnell said.
Marcus was loading cedar planks into his truck. He didn't stop. "People always talk," Marcus said. "About you and the Caldwell girl." Marcus kept loading. She's 35, Marcus said.
She's not a girl. Darnell leaned against the truck bed with his arms folded. Marcus, you hear what I'm saying? I hear you. You don't look like it bothers you.
It doesn't. Darnell was quiet for a moment. It should a little because it's going to reach her. These things always do. Marcus sat down the last plank and stood up straight and looked at his friend.
Not angrily, just steadily. Darnell, he said, I took a job. I'm doing the job. Everything else is people with too much time deciding what my motives are. And if she hears the rumors and believes them, Marcus said nothing for a moment.
Something moved behind his eyes that he didn't let onto his face. Then she does, he said finally. He closed the truck bed. Come on, man. Darnell shook his head.
That's it. That's all you've got. What do you want me to say? Marcus said, "Not sharply. Honestly, that I'm worried." "Yeah, I am, but I'm not going to go explain myself to a town full of people who've already made up their minds.
I didn't do anything wrong." "I know that," Darnell said. "Then act like it," Marcus said. He got in the truck. What he hadn't told Darnell, what he didn't say out loud, because saying it felt like giving it too much weight, was that the rumors weren't the thing that kept him awake on the third night after that conversation. What kept him awake was the possibility that Emily would hear them, and without meaning to find them, easier to believe than she should, because he'd seen the look on her face that first dinner night, the careful management of it, the long habit of people wanting something from her family.
He understood more than he'd said and more than she probably expected what it felt like to be seen as a means to an end. He'd felt it at Brentwell in the last weeks before he left. He'd felt it from certain people in town after Clare died. People who came around with casserles and condolences and stayed long enough to ask about the insurance. I understood the reflex.
What he didn't know was whether Emily had developed it deeply enough that it would override what she'd actually seen. and he didn't know how to find that out without making it into exactly the thing people were already accusing him of doing. He lay in the dark and thought about it and eventually Lily padded into his room in her socked feet the way she did sometimes when she couldn't sleep and climbed in beside him without asking and went immediately back to sleep the way only children can boneless and absolute. Marcus looked at the ceiling. He thought about Clare, about the way she used to say that fear was just love with nowhere to go. He'd never fully understood what she meant until after she was gone when he had more love than he knew what to do with and nowhere left to send it.
He pulled the blanket up over Lily's shoulder. He closed his eyes. He thought, "Whatever this is, I'm going to do it the right way. The only way I know how to do anything." He slept. What he didn't know was that while he slept, Richard Hayes's investigation had come back with results.
And Richard had found the Brentwell story. And instead of seeing it the way it actually was, a man choosing principle over comfort. Richard had found in it exactly the vulnerability he was looking for, not the truth of it, the way it could be shaped. Richard had spent 11 years in corporate environments, learning that most stories had two versions, the one that happened and the one that served the person telling it. He was exceptionally skilled at building the second version from the materials of the first.
He called a board member he trusted, an old ally named Gerald Marsh, who had known Henry Caldwell for 30 years, and whose primary concern was always in every circumstance the stability of the company. Gerald, Richard said, I need to talk to you about something that concerns me. Something involving Henry's judgment. Gerald's voice was careful. What kind of something? the kind that involves a man none of us know being given access to Caldwell property and significant amounts of time with Emily.
Richard paused, letting the silence do its work. A man who has a pattern of inserting himself into situations for his own benefit. Brentwell Construction isn't a name you've forgotten. Gerald hadn't. Nobody in Georgia construction circles had.