They want to put something big here. A complex of some kind. And they'll pay a fortune for it, but only if somebody delivers them the whole block. Clean every house. And your house is in the middle of a block, Emily said quietly.
My house is right in the middle of the block they need most. Marcus leaned back, which means without my house, the whole deal falls apart. I'm the hole in the middle. That's why they got less friendly when I said no. That's why the friendly folks turned into a con man on your street.
I wasn't one house out of a hundred to them. I was the one house the whole thing dies without. Emily sat down the paper she was holding. Her hands had stopped shaking hours ago. Somewhere in the reading, the fear had cooled into something harder and more useful.
So he targeted me because I was across the street from the one man who wouldn't sell. He spent four years married to the idea of me engaged to me planning a wedding with me. And the whole time I was just his position on the board. I was how he got a set of eyes across the street from you. A reason to be in the neighborhood.
Someone whose credit he could bleed to fund the buys. She laughed low and bitter. I keep finding new floors under the floor. Marcus, every time I think I've hit the bottom of how used I was, there's another basement. You want to stop for tonight?" Marcus asked gently.
"We can pick it up tomorrow. You've had about all a person can take in one day." "No," she pulled the next page toward her. "No, I want to keep going. He kept me in the dark for 4 years. I'm done being in the dark.
Every page I read is a page he doesn't get to hide behind anymore." And that was the moment though neither of them would have said it out loud that Marcus stopped seeing her as someone he was protecting and started seeing her as someone he was standing beside. There's a difference. He'd spent the whole week thinking of himself as the wall between Emily and the world. Watching her sit at that table at 1:00 in the morning, refusing to look away from the ugliest truth of her life, he understood she wasn't behind the wall. She was on it next to him.
It was Emily who found the thing that changed everything. It was almost 3. Marcus had gotten up to check on Ava for the third time. A habit that had gotten worse since they'd found his address on the list. And when he came back, Emily was sitting very still, holding a single sheet of paper, her face gone strange.
Marcus, her voice was careful. Come look at this. Tell me I'm reading it wrong. He came around and looked over her shoulder. It was a letter on the letterhead of the development company and it was dated two years back and it referenced a property acquisition and it was signed at the bottom by a name that meant nothing to Emily but it meant something to Marcus.
He went very still. Emily felt it in the air behind her the way a room changes when a person stops breathing. Marcus, read me that name again, he said quietly. The one on the signature. It says the acquisition was authorized by a aaa David Puit.
Senior acquisitions. Why do you know that name? Marcus straightened up slowly and walked to the other side of the kitchen and put both hands flat on the counter and stood there with his back to her. And for a long moment, he didn't say anything at all. Marcus, you're scaring me.
Who is David Puit? David Puit, Marcus said, and his voice had gone rough. Is the man who owned the construction company I worked for eight years ago. He's the man who cut every corner on a job we did downtown and when a scaffold came down and a man got hurt, he made sure it landed on somebody else. On the foreman, on a good man named Curtis who had nothing to do with it because Curtis was black and easy to blame and Puit was rich and had lawyers.
Marcus turned around. I testified. I told the truth about what Puit did. It cost me my job and it cost me 3 years of getting quietly blacklisted from every big company in the county, which is a good part of why I'm working two smaller jobs now instead of one good one. Pre-wit buried me for telling the truth.
And I have not heard that man's name in 8 years. The kitchen was silent. And now his name is on a letter, Emily said slowly. Authorizing the purchase of the houses on your street. The street where you live.
Marcus, that's not a coincidence. That can't be a coincidence. No, Marcus said, "It can't." He came back to the table and sat down heavily, and he put his face in his hands for a second, and when he took them away, his eyes were clear. But something in them had gone very old and very tired. "It was never just about the land," he said.
Or it started as land. But somewhere along the way, Puitit saw whose house was in the middle of the block. He saw my name, the man who testified against him, the man who cost him a lawsuit and a reputation and probably a lot of money. And I'll bet you anything, it stopped being business for him the day he saw that. It became personal.
Marcus shook his head slowly. That's why they got nasty so fast when I said no. That's why they didn't just skip my house and build around it. He doesn't just want the land, Emily. He wants me gone.
He wants me to lose my home. He wants to finish what he started 8 years ago and take the last thing I've got and do it to me in front of the whole neighborhood. His jaw tightened and Ryan's his instrument. Ryan's the guy he sent to do the dirty part where he doesn't have to get his own hands dirty. Emily reached across the table and took his hand the way he'd taken hers so many times that week and she held it hard.
Then we don't just stop Ryan, she said. We stop both of them. We take the whole thing apart. Because if it's personal for Puit Marcus, then he made a mistake. A man doing pure cold business is careful.
A man doing something personal gets sloppy. He gets emotional. He takes risks he shouldn't. Her eyes were sharp. Now, the eyes of the woman who ran a hospital department and did not lose.
You told me there'd be four years of him getting sloppy in these papers. I think we just found the reason he was sloppy. He wanted this too much. Marcus looked at her and despite everything, despite the exhaustion and the horror and the hour, something like a smile touched the corner of his mouth. Denise would have liked you, he said.