Take care of your nephew," she said. James looked at Ethan, who was watching the two of them with the expression of someone who has just been given a piece of his own history he didn't have before. "Always have," James said. "Always will." They move toward the building exit.
All of them together in the loose formation of people who have been through something difficult in proximity and are not quite ready to separate back into their individual lives. Ethan walked between his uncle and Marcus. He was quiet in a way that was different from the silence quiet of the courtroom. It was a thinking quiet, a processing quiet, the quality of someone who is taking inventory of what they have and what has changed. Dennis Marsh fell into step beside Victoria.
For what it's worth, he said, "I have been practicing law for 17 years, and today is the most extraordinary single day I have had in a courtroom." Victoria looked at him. "Is that good or bad?" "Profoundly good," Dennis said. "And mildly terrifying," she almost smiled. "
That's about right." "The Cho matter," Dennis said, lowering his voice. "The falsified records that doesn't end with today." "No," she agreed. The district attorney's office is going to get involved.
The hospital is going to conduct an internal review. Pullman's exposure goes significantly beyond what happened on Crestston Avenue. I know you're going to be asked to testify again, Dennis said. In whatever proceeding comes next, Victoria walked. I know that, too.
And I'll be there, she said. Same as today. Dennis looked at her sideways. You're not what I expected when Marcus described you. What did Marcus describe?
Someone who was very hard to find and very good at what she did, Dennis said. He didn't tell me the rest of it. The rest of what? Dennis was quiet for a moment. That you understand how rooms work, not just medical rooms.
All of them. The politics of them, the power structures, the way information moves and gets shaped. You knew about the chain of custody irregularities 3 weeks ago and you waited until you were under oath in front of a jury to say it. That's not nursing training. My mother was a public defender for 22 years.
Victoria said she taught you this. She showed me what it looked like. Victoria said that's different. They reached the main doors. Marcus pushed through first and held the door and Victoria stepped outside into the late afternoon and stopped.
The street in front of the courthouse held something she had not expected. Not because she hadn't been told. Marcus had mentioned two hours ago that people were gathering. But being told something and being in front of it were different things. There were motorcycles along the curb in both directions.
She couldn't count them easily. They were parked in staggered rows and the rider stood or leaned beside them with a particular unhurried quality of people who have come somewhere to be present and are not in a hurry to stop being present. Some of them she could see were older. Some of them she could see were young. They came in the full range of human faces and sizes.
And the only thing uniform about them was the way they were standing, waiting, not aggressively, not performatively, but with the particular intentionality of people who have decided that this moment required their physical presence and have provided it. When she stepped through the door, the sound that moved through them was not a shout. It was not a cheer. It was something lower and more resonant. A collective acknowledgement like an exhale like the sound a room makes when something that has been held too long is finally released.
Victoria stood on the courthouse steps and looked at them. One of them a large man with gray in his beard who she would later learn had been one of the 12 in the warehouse simply raised one hand. Not dramatically, not as a salute, just raised it. The way you raise a hand to someone across a room when words are the wrong distance. Others did the same.
It moved through them in a wave. Victoria's throat tightened. She recognized the feeling and let it be there without pushing it down. She had learned over years that some moments were entitled to exactly the amount they asked for, and this was one of them. Marcus came to stand beside her. "
You said you didn't want any of this," he said. "I didn't. Do you want it now?" She looked at the row of raised hands, at the faces that belong to lives that had continued. At the gray-bearded man who was now lowering his hands slowly with the careful dignity of someone completing a ceremony.
One isn't the right word, she said. What's the right word? She thought about it. Receive, she said finally. I think I can receive it.
Marcus was quiet, then good. Ethan came through the door behind them with James at his side. When Ethan saw the street, the rows of bikes, the riders, the collective presence assembled in the late afternoon, he stopped. He looked at it. He looked at Marcus. "
For me," he said. "For both of you," Marcus said. "But don't let it go to your head." The gray bearded man walked up from the street. He was enormous broad through the chest and shoulders, moving with the deliberateness of a large man who has learned to occupy his size without letting it become threatening.
He walked up to Victoria and stopped. My name is Roy Baines, he said. You probably don't remember me specifically. I remember a voice in the smoke, she said, telling someone named Deacon to stay low. Roy Baines blinked.
That's me. His voice went rough for a moment. He cleared it. That's me exactly, she looked at him. I want to ask you something, Roy said.
Go ahead. All these years, he said, you never reached out, never sent word that you were okay, that you'd gotten out safe. We didn't know if you'd made it. For almost 2 months, we didn't know. He paused.