I told you that already. But she really would have. You've got the same thing she had. You get calmer the worse it gets. Most people fall apart.
You get sharp. I fell apart on a hallway floor a week ago. Emily reminded him. Yeah, well, you picked yourself up off it. That's the part that counts.
They finally slept a few hours, Emily, in the guest room and Marcus on the couch because he wanted to be between the front door and the rest of the house. And in the morning, the whole thing had a different shape. They weren't hiding anymore. They weren't two scared people waiting for a con man to make his move. They were two people who knew the con knew the man behind it and had a folder full of his sloppiness sitting on the kitchen table.
But knowing a thing and proving a thing are two different animals, and the days that followed taught them exactly how far apart those two animals are. They went back to the police with the folder, and the detective was more interested this time. But he told them what folders like this always get told. That financial crime was complicated, that LLC's were legal, that buying up property was legal, that they'd need forensic accountants, and a case built over months, and that in the meantime, none of it changed the fact that Ryan hadn't yet done anything they could arrest him for. The fraud on Emily's credit was the strongest thing they had, and even that would take time to build.
So, we're still waiting for him to hurt somebody, Emily said in the parking lot afterward, her voice flat. We're not waiting, Marcus said. We're just not waiting on them. There's more than one way to take a man apart. Pwit buried me with lawyers and money 8 years ago because I only had the truth and he had everything else.
But it's a different situation now. Now I've got the truth and I've got proof and I've got a witness. He looked at her. You You lived inside this thing for four years. You can testify to who Ryan really is and what he did.
That's not nothing, Emily. That's the piece Puit never counted on. He never counted on his own instrument turning around and telling the truth about him. That evening, Marcus made some calls. He called Curtis, the foreman who'd taken the fall 8 years ago, the good man Puit had thrown to the wolves.
Curtis was older now, still carried a limp from the accident. Still carried the anger, too. And when Marcus told him Puit's name was surfacing again, that there might finally be a way to put a spotlight on the man, Curtis went quiet on the phone for a long moment, and then said in a low voice that he'd been waiting 8 years for somebody to say those words to him. And Marcus called a woman named Denise's cousin, a journalist in Atlanta who covered real estate and development and the quiet ways money pushed working families out of neighborhoods. A woman who'd been at the funeral 3 years ago and had told Marcus at the time that if he ever needed anything, anything at all, he was to call.
He'd never called. He wasn't a man who called for help, but he called her now. Emily watched him make the calls and understood what she was watching. She was watching a man who'd spent 3 years believing he had to carry everything alone finally deliberately pick up a phone and let other people help him carry it. She understood what it cost him.
She'd told him once that nobody did anything for free, that everybody had an angle. Watching Marcus swallow his pride and ask for help, not for himself, but to protect his home and his daughter and the woman across the street, she finally understood that some people's only angle is that they love hard and they show up. She just never met one before. Marcus, the journalist, whose name was Ranatada, came over two nights later and spread the folder out across the kitchen table and went through it with the focus of someone who'd been chasing exactly this kind of story her whole career. She asked Marcus and Emily a hundred questions.
She made copies of everything. And when she was done near midnight, she sat back and looked at the two of them. "I've been trying to nail this development company for 2 years," she said. I knew somebody was assembling parcels in working neighborhoods and pushing people out. And I knew it was ugly, but I could never connect the shell companies to a real person.
You know what you've got in this folder. She tapped it. You've got the connection. You've got a signed letter putting David Puit at the top of it. And you've got She looked at Emily, a witness who was on the inside for 4 years and is willing to go on the record.
Do you understand what that is? That's a story that runs on the front page. And a story on the front page does something the police can't do fast enough. It makes it public. It makes it expensive.
It makes every partner and investor and bank connected to Pwit suddenly very nervous about being in business with a man who targets widows and cons women out of their credit to bulldo black neighborhoods. Ranata's eyes were bright. You don't beat a man like Puit in a courtroom. Not first. You beat him in the daylight.
You make him too radioactive to touch and then the courtroom follows. For the first time in the whole ordeal, Marcus felt something he'd almost forgotten the shape of hope. Real specific hope with a plan attached to it. But Ryan, it turned out, had been building his own timeline all along. It was 3 days later on a Saturday that everything came to a head.
And it came to a head in a way none of them had planned for because there was one thing about the plan that Marcus had gotten wrong. He'd assumed they had time. He'd assumed the story would run first, that they'd get ahead of it, that they'd control when the daylight came. But a cornered man moves on his own schedule. And Ryan had figured out somehow that Emily had taken the folder.
He'd figured out that his position was slipping. And a man like Ryan, when he feels the con coming apart, doesn't fold, he doubles down. There was a neighborhood block party that Saturday. An annual thing, the kind of event where the whole street came out with folding tables and grills and coolers where kids ran around and old folks sat in lawn chairs and everybody who'd lived on that block for 30 years came together in the one afternoon a year they all had time for. It was Marcus realized too late the perfect stage.
Everyone Ryan wanted to poison against him would be in one place. Ryan showed up at 4:00 in the afternoon. He came clean and pressed and smiling and he brought a woman with him. Marcus didn't recognize and he moved through the party like he belonged there shaking hands, introducing himself and Marcus standing at the grill with Ava beside him felt his whole body go cold the second he saw him. Ava," he said quietly.
"Go find Miss Emily. Stay with her. Don't come back over here till I come get you." "Okay, baby. Go on now." Ava, who was eight but not stupid, looked at her father's face and did exactly what he said. Ryan made his way over, still smiling, and stopped a few feet from Marcus and in a voice pitched just loud enough for the nearest neighbors to hear.
He said, "Marcus Williams, I've heard so much about you. The man who took in my Emily when she was going through her episode. Real neighborly of you. The word episode hung in the air. Ugly and deliberate.
I've been worried sick about her. She hasn't been well. And I have to say, a grown man taking in a vulnerable woman like that, keeping her over there, not letting her family reach her. Some folks might wonder about that. And there it was, the move.