The younger council member beside him nodded, visibly relieved to finally have somewhere solid to stand.
Walter Colton sat very still, his lawyer beside him no longer bothering to whisper anything at all. The man had, in fact, quietly gathered his briefcase several minutes earlier. Sensing, the way lawyers in expensive suits often do, exactly which way a room was about to turn.
"Mr. Colton," Diane Sorenson said, quiet but firm. "Do you have anything you'd like to add?"
For a long moment, Walter said nothing.
He looked at his son. At the pale, trembling shape of a 30-year-old man who had never once in his entire life been made to answer for anything.
And something in Walter's face finally, visibly, broke.
He stood slowly.
"I think," he said. And his voice, so practiced, so smooth all evening, came out rough now. Unrehearsed. "I think I owe this council an apology. And I think I owe somebody else in this town a much older one, if what Ms. Hail found in that archive turns out to be what I'm very much afraid it is."
He looked, then, directly at Ren.
"I don't remember the Ruiz family," he admitted. "That's the truth, and it's a shameful one. I evicted a great many families over the years, Ms. Hail. And I never once thought hard enough about a single one of them to remember a name. I built a business, and eventually a career on this council, on being efficient about things like that. I am beginning to understand, sitting in this room tonight, exactly what that kind of efficiency costs other people."
His voice caught.
"If that widow's 12-year-old son grew up to be the man who saved your life and lost his own doing it, then I am the last person in this room who has any right to stand up here tonight and ask you to be punished for anything."
He turned to the council.
"I withdraw my complaint," he said. "And I think, given everything this room has just heard, it's clear I've got no business continuing to hold a council seat in a town I've apparently done this kind of harm in, quietly, for years, without ever once being made to see it. I'll be submitting my resignation in the morning."
He sat back down, hands trembling slightly.
And beside him, Grant Colton stared at the floor. The first real silence Ren had ever seen settle over him. The silence of a man finally, belatedly, meeting the bottom of himself, and finding, underneath all that noise, almost nothing there at all.
Diane Sorenson let the room breathe for a moment before speaking again.
"I think," she said carefully, "this council owes Ms. Hail a formal apology of its own, for entertaining this complaint as long as we did. Ms. Hail, on behalf of this council, and, I believe, on behalf of this town, I'm sorry."
A sound rose from the back of the room then. Quiet at first.
Ren turned to see Marjorie clapping. And then Earl beside her. And then Norah, one hand still on her stomach. And then Frank, cane propped against his chair so he could bring both hands together properly. And then the whole room, standing.