No, I didn't think you would. Marcus glanced toward the back of the shop at the service door that now had a new deadbolt. Emma had called a locksmith at 7 that morning first thing before the coffee. What he's giving Patricia is internal documentation, communications between company leadership authorizing the pressure campaign against people who'd been connected to Angela's complaint, emails, directives, a chain of command that goes well above Derek. Emma was very still.
How far up? She said the company has four principals. Marcus said Derek's documentation implicates three of them directly. The fourth may have maintained plausible deniability or he may not have. That's what the investigation determines.
Emma thought about the veteran in Mesa who'd sold his truck. The elderly woman in Chandler, $11,000. She thought about them in the particular way she'd been thinking about them for eight months. Not as abstract victims, but as actual people with actual faces. Some of whom she'd met and some she'd only heard described, but all of whom had been real and present in her mind the entire time she was building the case, like photographs she carried behind her sternum. "
Three principals," she said. " Three," Marcus confirmed. That's, she stopped. " That's what Angela needed." " That's what Angela needed," Marcus agreed.
Emma put both hands flat on the counter and looked at them, steady, the way they always were. Her father's hands doing her father's kind of work in the only way she'd ever known how to do it, which was thoroughly and without asking anyone to notice. " There's something else," Marcus said. His tone shifted slightly, not darker, more careful. Emma looked up. "
The story is out," Marcus said. " About yesterday, the shop, the 300 people." Emma closed her eyes briefly. " How? Multiple phones on that street.
Multiple people who know what they saw. He paused. It's not bad coverage. The framing is it's actually accurate, which is not always what happens. The focus is on what you were doing on Angela on the case, not on theatrics.
But it's out. Emma said, "It's out." She absorbed this. She had known it was coming. You don't put 300 motorcycles on a Phoenix street in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon and expect silence."
She had known it and she had chosen to make the call anyway, which meant she had made her peace with it. Except that making peace with something in the abstract and then sitting across from the fact of it were different experiences. People are going to want to talk to me, she said. Some already do. I've had four media inquiries since this morning.
Patricia is going to want to manage what you say and when because anything public right now gets factored into the case. I understand. Emma. Marcus waited until she was fully looking at him. You're about to be visible in a way you've never been visible.
A lot of people are going to want to tell your story, and most of them are going to want to tell the version that's simplest to explain in 90 seconds. He held her gaze. The woman who called 300 bikers for protection. That's the story most of them will want. That's not the whole story, Emma said.
No, but it's the part that travels. She understood what he was saying. The complicated version await months of documentation. Angela Rea's 47 families, a legal case that had been built carefully and quietly by people who were afraid but did it anyway. That version took time to tell.
It needed space and patience and an audience willing to follow a thread. The simple version traveled fast, and the simple version, however incomplete, put Emma's face on it. She thought about what that meant for the shop. For Angela, who had stayed quiet and careful for a year and deserved to have her story told on her own terms. For the 47 families who were still waiting to see whether the thing they'd been promised that documenting what happened to them would actually matter would come true. "
What do I do?" she said. " Talk to Patricia before you say anything to anyone. Let her set the terms." Marcus stood.
And in the meantime, keep your door locked. Keep your phone close and for the next week, don't be here alone. " William's already planning on it," Emma said dryly. " He'll be here whether I ask him or not." Marcus almost smiled. "
I know. I'm asking you to let him." She nodded. Marcus moved towards the door. He had more things to manage, and she knew it.
He always did. That was the nature of who Marcus Callahan was. The weight of what he carried on behalf of other people. The enormous quiet labor of being the person other people called when things were beyond what they could hold alone. Marcus, Emma said.
He stopped. Yesterday, she said, the memorial Bobby Decker, she paused. I'm sorry the day got interrupted. Marcus was quiet for a moment. Bobby Decker, he said, spent 30 years showing up for people who needed showing up for.
Yesterday was, he stopped, reconsidered. " Bobby would have thought yesterday was exactly the right way to spend the afternoon." He left. Emma stood in her empty shop. She stood there long enough that the silence stopped feeling heavy and started feeling like something else.