I watched how he handled it. He's steady under pressure. That's not common." James looked at her. He gets it from his mother, my sister.
She's He stopped. She called me Thursday when she heard about Cho. First thing she said was, "Is Victoria Hayes all right?" Not Ethan. Not Pullman.
You. Victoria was quiet. She wanted me to tell you thank you. James said she doesn't. She has trouble with the phone since a health thing a few years back.
But she wanted me to tell you directly. Tell her I'm all right. Victoria said, "And tell her Ethan handled it himself well. She raised someone steady." James nodded.
He looked down at his coffee, then back up. The fire, he said. She waited. I've thought about it almost every day for four years, he said. Not with fear, just it was the most real I have ever felt.
Not during the fire. During the fire, I was terrified. I'm not going to pretend I wasn't. But after walking out of that building and realizing I was walking out of it. There's a clarity in that moment that I've never found anywhere else.
I know that feeling, Victoria said. You do, he said. Not a question recognition. Every time the trauma bay goes a certain way, she said, "When something that looked impossible goes right, there's a second at the end where everything is very clear and very simple." Yes, James said. "
That's it exactly." He looked at her. I want to ask you something. You can tell me. It's none of my business.
Ask the night of the fire. He said, "Were you scared?" Victoria looked at him. She thought about honest versus true. The difference between the answer that was factually accurate and the answer that told the truth.
I was terrified, she said. I was so scared my hands were shaking. I kept them moving so nobody would see. James stared at her. The calm voice, he said, the absolute calm voice on the radio was terrified on the inside.
She said, "That's that's the thing I want you to understand because I think you might have built a version of that night in your head where I was fearless and I wasn't. I was afraid and I went anyway." And the going anyway is the only part that matters. James Cole sat at his kitchen table with his coffee growing cold in his hands and looked at the woman across from him. He said, "My daughter is going to hear this story." "
Good," Victoria said. "The real version," he said, "the terrified and went anyway version. That's the only version worth telling us, she said. They sat in the kitchen for another hour. They talked about Rose and about James' work and about the neighborhood and about the small, ordinary things that make up the texture of a life.
They did not perform anything for each other. They were simply two people who had been connected by one terrible night and had arrived on the other side of it and were now having coffee on a Saturday morning. When Victoria stood to leave, James walked her to the door. He said, "Same time next month. She looked at him.
Saturday morning coffee. If you're willing, she thought about what Marcus had asked her. Are you willing to stop disappearing? She thought about what she had said in return. I'm willing, she said.
3 weeks later, on a Tuesday morning that looked like no particular kind of morning, Derek Pullman was indicted on six counts. Obstruction of justice, evidence tampering, extortion, witness intimidation, conspiracy to commit fraud. In one count she had not expected and that Kelner had not mentioned in their first meeting racketeering tied to the business activities that Ethan had witnessed and that the investigation had fully excavated in the weeks since Cho began cooperating. Dennis called her when the indictment was announced. His voice had the controlled quality of someone who is very pleased and is allowing himself to be very pleased in a measured way.
Six counts, he said. I heard racketeering surprised me. He said it shouldn't have. She said Kelner is thorough. Pullman's attorney is already talking about challenging the admissibility of the server logs.
Dennis said they'll lose that challenge. Victoria said the chain of custody on those logs is clean. Stein documented everything correctly from the moment he pulled them. I know. Dennis said, but it means more proceedings, more testimony.
I know that too, she said. You're still in Denon, she said. When have I suggested otherwise? A pause. Then with the slightly surprised quality of a man who has been given consistently more than he expected never.
Let Kelner know I'm available whenever she needs me, Victoria said. And tell Ethan to call me if he needs to talk before his testimony. Not about the legal strategy. That's your territory. Just to talk.
I'll tell him, Dennis said. She hung up. She sat in the break room of the trauma unit with 15 minutes left before her shift resumed. And she thought about what the next several months would look like. The hearings, the testimony, the slow, grinding process of a criminal prosecution moving through its stages.
She thought about Pullman's lawyers and what they would find and what they would try to do with what they found. She thought about the ways cases like this could go sideways, the witnesses who recanted, the evidence that got challenged on technicalities, the juries that convicted on some counts and acquitted on others. She thought about her mother, who had stood in difficult rooms for 22 years with the knowledge that winning was not guaranteed and who had stood there anyway. She thought about the text she would receive in the fall. Just a date and a word.