Not all at once in the gradual organic way of people at a gathering who were working their way towards someone they'd wanted to meet. Some of them had been part of the roof crew. Some of them he recognized from the morning after the settlement when three Hell's Angles members had shown up at his door without explanation and helped him carry Margaret's filing cabinet from the back room to a better location in the hallway because Decker had mentioned it was in an awkward spot and apparently that was the kind of information that traveled. A man named Vic somewhere in his 60s with a working life written on his face the same way it was written on Ethan's shook his hand and said, "My brother-in-law had a Chevy 350. He couldn't get running right for three years.
Decker said, "You know engines? Think you could take a look sometime?" "Sure," Ethan said. "What's it doing?" They talked about the engine for 10 minutes, which was the best 10 minutes Ethan had spent at a social event in years, possibly decades.
Jackson found him after that. He came across the room without urgency, and the men who were between him and Ethan moved aside, not from any instruction, but from the habitual spatial awareness of people who'd been moving around Jackson Morgan long enough that it had become reflexive. He shook Ethan's hand and held it for a moment. Not the performative grip of a man demonstrating strength, but the grip of someone who was communicating something that didn't have a verbal equivalent. "Glad you're here," Jackson said.
Glad to be here, Ethan said, and meant it in a way that surprised him slightly the way honest statements sometimes did. They found a quieter corner of the room, not isolated, just removed from the densest part of the conversation, and stood there with their drinks, the way two men who had done a great deal together in a short time, sometimes needed to simply be in the same space without the pressure of the next thing to navigate. "Ryes called me this morning," Jackson said. What did he say? The audit firm started Monday.
Jackson said he's already gotten a preliminary look at the scope. He thinks they're going to find the same compounding structure in more than 40 Arizona modifications. He paused. 40. Ethan absorbed that number.
He'd known it was going to be larger than nine. He hadn't quite calibrated for 40. What happens when the audit report is filed? He asked. The AG's office moves.
Jackson said. Reyes is confident. He said he's been in contact with someone there who was very specific about the word confident. He looked at Ethan steadily. This becomes a state regulatory action, not just a civil case.
Apex is going to face consequences that go beyond reimbursing nine homeowners. Ethan thought about that, about what it meant, about the shape of it. One wallet, one decision, one chain of events that had gone from a highway shoulder outside Flagstaff to the Arizona Attorney General's office in less than three weeks. You're thinking about Margaret, Jackson said. Ethan looked at him.
How do you know that? Because you get a specific look, Jackson said simply. When you're thinking about her, I've only known you two weeks, but it's not a subtle look. Ethan thought about that for a moment, about being known the specific experience of someone else having paid enough attention to read you accurately. He hadn't had that in three years.
I was thinking about what she would say, Ethan said. What would she say was? He thought about it honestly. She'd probably say she told me so. He paused and she'd say it kindly enough that I wouldn't be able to argue.
Jackson made a sound that was the closest thing to a laugh Ethan had heard from him. Brief and unguarded and real. Lily was like that too, Jackson said. I know, Ethan said. You told me.
I keep telling you things about her, Jackson said. It wasn't quite a question. I don't mind, Ethan said. Keep going. Another brief silence.
Then Jackson said she wanted to be a lawyer. Did I tell you that? No. She was pre-law when she died, junior year. He looked at his drink. Sometimes I think about her watching what Campos and Reyes did this week, what you started.
He stopped. She would have had opinions about all of it. Very detailed, very specific opinions. She sounds like she would have been formidable, Ethan said. She was already formidable, Jackson said quietly.
At 25, they were quiet for a moment. The comfortable kind, the kind that didn't need to be filled. Then Jackson said, I want to show you something after tonight. I mean, not right now. What is it?
Ethan said. A project, Jackson said. Something we've been building for a few years that hasn't had the right shape to it yet. The right framework. He looked at Ethan.
I think it does now. Ethan waited. After Lily died, Jackson said, "I couldn't I needed to do something with it. The grief, I mean, I couldn't just carry it." He paused.
The club has been building a community legal fund. Small, local, aimed at exactly the kind of situation you were in. Elderly home runs, rural properties, people who have assets that need protecting but no access to the legal resources to protect them. He paused again. We've had the money.
We've had the will. We've never had a structure or a credibility that let us use it effectively because anything associated with the hell's angles, any good thing gets filtered through the reputation before it gets evaluated on its own merits. Ethan was listening very carefully. What happened in the last two weeks, Jackson said, is a structure, a demonstrated, documented, legally successful structure. Reyes and Campos and nine plaintiffs and a retired mechanic from Flagstaff who returned a wallet and decided not to stop there.
He looked at Ethan. That story, the one Sarah Chen wrote, the one that's been shared 40,000 times as of this morning, that story isn't about the hell's angles. It's about a person making a right decision and what came from it. And that story is attached to a legal process that is now public record. 40,000 times Ethan had stopped tracking the article shares after the first day.
"What are you asking me?" Ethan said. "I'm not asking you anything tonight," Jackson said. I'm telling you, there's something to look at when you're fetty. Something that might take what happened here and let it happen again for other people in the same situation.