Kelner held her gaze for a long moment. Then she nodded. We'll be in touch about next steps likely within the week. She stood. Victoria stood.
They shook hands again. And when Victoria walked out of that building and into the morning, something had shifted in the way the day felt against her. Not lighter, exactly. More purposeful. The difference between weight you are carrying and weight you are using.
She called Marcus from the sidewalk. He picked up on the second ring. How'd it go? Cho is cooperating, she said. A pause.
Since when? His attorney called Kelner this morning at 8:30. Another paused longer. She could hear him processing it. So Pullman already knows.
He knows Cho flipped. She said, "Yes, his lawyers will be moving to control the narrative." Marcus said offers media statements, character witnesses. He'll try to build a wall between himself and the criminal exposure. Kelner seems prepared for that.
She's good, Marcus said. I know her reputation. She's very good. Marcus Victoria said Ethan needs to know about Cho before it's in the news. I'll call him right now.
And James, she said James deserves to know what his nephew's testimony was connected to the full thing. I know. Marcus said, I've been thinking about how to do that conversation directly. She said, James is the kind of man who wants things said plainly. Yeah, Marcus said he is.
A pause. How are you doing? Not the case. You. Victoria stood on the sidewalk with the morning moving around her.
Traffic, people with coffee cups, the ordinary forward motion of a city going about its business in complete indifference to the fact that something had been decided in a courtroom yesterday that was going to change the shape of several lives. I'm all right, she said. Honest answer. She thought about it. I'm tired.
I'm clear. I'm not sorry I did any of it. That's a good place to be, Marcus. She said, "Yeah, that text you send on the anniversary." She said, "Just the date in the word still." "
Yes." "Who do you send it to?" A long pause. "All 12," he said. "And I get 12 back."
Victoria stood with that for a moment. 12 men once a year on a specific date, confirming to each other that they are still in the world. A ritual that had been running for 4 years. A thread that connected 12 lives to a single night and to each other. 13 now," she said.
She heard him go quiet in a way that was different from his usual quiet, deeper. 13, he said. The week that followed moved fast and slow at the same time, fast in the practical sense, because the Pullman investigation was moving with the momentum that public attention and a cooperating witness create and slow in the personal sense. Because Victoria was also living her regular life, working her regular shifts, handling the regular emergencies that arrived in the trauma unit at unpredictable hours with no regard for what else was happening in her existence. She testified before a grand jury on Thursday.
She described the same evidence she had described in the courtroom with the same clarity to a group of people who had not been in the room for the original proceeding and who needed to understand why what she was saying mattered. She took her time with them. She used the same plain language. She answered the questions asked and did not volunteer beyond what was asked because she had learned from watching her mother for 22 years that grand jury proceedings reward precision and punish performance. When she finished and walked out of the room, Dennis was in the hallway.
Good, he said. They understood, she said. That's all that matters. On Friday, Pullman's attorney issued a statement to the press describing the investigation as politically motivated and his client as a victim of orchestrated character assassination. Victoria read it once and put her phone down and went back to work.
On Saturday morning, she drove to James Cole's house. She had not called ahead. She brought coffee from the corner place near her apartment, the good kind, the kind worth driving across town with, and she knocked on the door. James answered it in a sweatshirt and the expression of a man who was surprised in the particular way of someone who has not quite allowed themselves to believe that the good things from the previous week were real and permanent. Victoria, he said, I brought coffee.
She said, can I come in? He opened the door wider. The house was modest and lived in with the quality of a space that has been organized by someone who cares but does not perform caring. There were photos on the wall near the entrance, family pictures, the unself-conscious, and in one of them, Victoria saw a small girl with an enormous grin in a gap where a front tooth had recently been who she knew without being told was Rose. James poured the coffee into actual mugs without asking whether she wanted a mug, and she appreciated that about him.
They sat at the kitchen table. "Cho flip," he said, and you heard. "Marcus called me Wednesday." He wrapped both hands around his mug. Means it's going forward.
The real case. Yes. Means Ethan testifies likely. She said what he witnessed, what he saw that made Pullman decide he was a problem that's going to be central. Dennis is already preparing him.
James was quiet for a moment. 8 months. He said, "My nephew spent 8 months with that charge hanging over him. 8 months of people looking at him like he was the kind of person who attacks someone without cause. I know.
He's a good kid." James said, "People don't always You see the way he presents, the way he carries himself. You make assumptions, but he's a good kid." "I know he is." Victoria said, "I sat next to him in that courtroom for 3 hours.