"Your professor is correct," Hart said. "And your mother's documentation demonstrates effect with exceptional clarity."
Thomas looked at Margaret. She looked back at him. Something passed between them that didn't need language—something about all the letters, all the months, all the distance, and the fact that they were both sitting at this table in this kitchen that had been hers before Henry and would be Thomas's after her, and it was still here. It was still theirs.
"We're going to win," Thomas said. Not a question.
"I believe so," Hart said. "But I want to discuss the remaining risk factors."
He did—all of them. He was not a man who protected his clients from reality, which was one of the things Margaret trusted most about him. He laid out the ways it could go wrong: a biased judge, a procedural challenge that delayed the hearing past the thirty-day window, Mercer producing a witness who was willing to lie under oath. And he assigned each one a probability and a response.
Thomas listened to all of it. Then he said, "The witness problem. If Mercer puts someone on the stand who supports his version of the account records—"
"I have Henry's ledgers and twelve years of consistent entries," Margaret said. "No single witness can contradict twelve years of consistent handwriting and documented payments."
"But they can muddy it," Thomas said. "They can make the judge uncertain enough to reserve judgment. Uncertainty benefits Mercer, because delay benefits Mercer. If the judge reserves instead of ruling at the hearing, the land stays in dispute and Mercer keeps the pressure on."
Hart looked at Thomas for a long moment. "That is a sophisticated reading of litigation risk."
"My mother has been living inside this for eight months," Thomas said. "I've been reading her letters. I know the shape of it." He turned to Margaret. "Is there anyone in this town who actually witnessed Mercer altering his account records? Not just the consequences of it—the actual act of changing an entry?"
The room was quiet. Margaret thought. She had asked herself this question before and found no answer. Mercer was not a man who made adjustments in front of witnesses. But there was one person she hadn't been able to reach. One person who had worked inside Mercer's store for six years and had left Red Hollow quietly in the spring with no explanation given and no forwarding address.