Daddy said I can't just make something true by drawing it, but I figured I'd draw it anyway. In case. In case what, baby? Emily asked, her voice thick. In case it wants to come true, Ava said like it was obvious.
Some things just need somebody to draw them first. And over the child's head, Emily looked up at Marcus. And Marcus looked back at her, and neither of them said anything. Because some things you don't say out loud in front of an 8-year-old holding the whole future in a folded piece of construction paper. But something passed between them on that front step in the last of the evening light that was the beginning of an answer to a question neither of them had worked up the courage to ask yet.
It wasn't over. There'd be a trial. There'd be prewitz lawyers and there'd be hard days on the witness stand. And there'd be nights when the old fear tried to climb back in. The road wasn't finished.
But Marcus Williams, who had spent 3 years believing that the strongest thing a man could do was carry every burden alone, stood in his own doorway and looked at the two people on his front step, and understood finally all the way down to the bottom of himself that he'd had it backwards the whole time. The strongest thing a man could do wasn't carrying it all alone. It was letting somebody help him carry it and letting himself at last be somebody worth helping. The trial took 11 months to arrive and every one of those months tested them. Puit did exactly what Marcus had warned he would do.
He didn't fold. He hired the kind of lawyers who charge more in an hour than Marcus made in a week. And they came at everyone. They came at Emily digging through four years of her life, twisting her own trust against her, asking in a dozen polite ways how a smart hospital administrator could possibly not have known as if being deceived were the crime and not the deception. They came at Curtis, dredging up the old accident, implying the 8-year-old anger had rotted the old man into an unreliable witness.
And they came at Marcus, of course. They came at Marcus painting him exactly the way Ryan had tried to paint him at the block party. The working man who' taken in a vulnerable woman who had something to gain who couldn't be trusted. There was a night maybe 4 months before the trial when it nearly broke him. A second lawyer's letter had come and then a process server and then a story planted in some smaller outlet questioning whether Marcus had coached his neighbors.
And Marcus sat at the kitchen table that night with his head in his hands and said the thing he'd been swallowing for weeks. "Maybe I should just sell," he said quietly. "Maybe I should take Ava and take whatever they offer and just go somewhere Pit's never heard of and let this whole thing die." Emily didn't argue with him right away. That was the thing about her he'd come to lean on. She didn't rush to fix.
She sat down across from him and let the words sit in the room for a second so he could hear how they sounded out loud. "You could do that," she said finally. "You could sell and you'd be safe and Ava would be safe and Puit would win and he'd do it to the next street and the next because it worked. Because the one man in the middle who wouldn't sell finally sold." She reached across and took his hands and pulled them down from his face so he'd look at her. But that's not why you'd be doing it.
You'd be doing it because you're tired and you're scared and you've been carrying this for months and those are real. But Marcus, you told me something once on this exact table the first week I was here. You told me you were afraid of losing your integrity more than you were afraid of losing anything else. Do you remember? Marcus remembered that man is still in there.
Emily said, "The one who testified 8 years ago knowing what it had cost him. The one who ran across the street in his socks. Being tired doesn't make him gone. It just makes him tired. So be tired.
You're allowed. But don't sell. Her voice dropped. Because in a year when this is over, you're going to have to look at Ava and tell her how it ended. And I know you, Marcus Williams.
There's a version of that conversation you can live with, and there's a version you can't sell. And you'll spend the rest of your life explaining to her why the good guys don't always win. Stay and you get to show her they sometimes do. Marcus was quiet a long time. How do you always know exactly what to say to me?
He asked. Because I listen to you, Emily said simply. That's all. Four years I spent with a man who talked at me. I forgot people could listen and then I met one who did.
So I learned to do it back. He didn't sell. The trial came and it was every bit as hard as they'd feared and harder in ways they hadn't. Emily took the stand and had four years of her private life pried open in front of strangers. And there were moments the lawyers got to her.
Moments. Her voice shook. Moments. Marcus sat in the gallery with his hands clenched so hard his nails bit his palms because he couldn't do anything but watch. But every time they tried to make her small, she got bigger, the way she always had.
And when Pruit's lead attorney asked her in that oily, reasonable voice whether it wasn't true that she was simply a woman scorned exaggerating a breakup, Emily looked at him and said clear and level. So the whole courtroom heard it that a scorned woman wants her man back and she didn't want anything back. She just wanted the truth on the record. And the truth was that a man had spent four years running a con and she had the documents to prove it and did council want her to read the account numbers out loud. Curtis took the stand and told the story he'd waited 8 years to tell.
And this time there was no company lawyer able to bury it because this time it wasn't one broken foreman alone. It was one voice in a chorus. And a chorus is harder to silence than a single man. And Marcus took the stand last. They tried the thing on him.
They'd been building the whole trial, the insinuation, the working man with the angle, the shelter that was really a scheme. And Marcus sat there in a borrowed suit and answered every question plainly. And when the lawyer finally asked him with a little smile what exactly he'd hoped to gain by taking Emily Carter into his home. Marcus was quiet for a moment, and then he said the truest thing. He had the same way he'd been saying true things his whole life without decoration.
I didn't hope to gain anything. Marcus said a person screamed across the street from my house at night, so I went. That's the whole story. My mother raised me to go when somebody screams. My wife loved me for it before she passed, and I'm raising my daughter to do the same.
You keep asking me what my angle was. He looked at the lawyer, and then he looked just for a second at the jury. I don't have an angle. I know men with angles exist. I've got one sitting at that table.
But some of us just go when somebody screams. And I'm sorry if that's hard for your client to understand, but it's not hard for most folks to understand because most folks would have done the same thing. The courtroom was very quiet. Pwitt was convicted on the fraud and conspiracy charges. Ryan, whose real name and real record had come out in full by then, took a plea and testified against Puit in exchange for a lighter sentence.