When have I told you anything else? How long have you known about Pinnacle Financial Recovery?" Emma was quiet for a moment. " Since Angela came to me about eight months ago. The legal-aid organization, the documentation, the complaint—I've been coordinating with them for most of that time."
Marcus turned to look at her directly. " You've been building a case." " Angela was building a case," Emma said carefully. " I was helping," Emma, she looked at him. " You know what you've been doing," he said, not accusatory, not even particularly surprised, just clear.
The directness of a man who respects someone too much to pretend. She held his gaze. Yes. And you know that when people like Derek Holloway figure out what you've been doing, they come at you hard. " I did not expect them to come through the back door," Emma said.
That part I will admit I underestimated. " That's the first smart thing you've said in the last two minutes." The other things I said were also smart despite everything the corner of Marcus'ss mouth moved. Then it settled again. The footage is good, but he said the documentation is good.
Angela's testimony is going to be good, but Derek Holloway works for people who have money and lawyers and people with money and lawyers have a way of making things slow down. He looked at her steadily. You need to be prepared for this to get harder before it gets easier. I've been prepared for that, Emma said. And for the part where it gets personal, where they find other things to come at you with.
Emma was quiet. Your lease, Marcus said. Is it secure? Emma's expression changed slightly. Just slightly.
But Marcus had known her face for 25 years since she was a child, sitting in her father's garage listening to stories about roads. She was too young to ride on and he caught it. " My landlord," she said carefully, received a letter 3 weeks ago from a property management company suggesting he could get 15% more per square foot if he let this space go to market. Marcus stared at her. I didn't connect it to Pinnacle at the time, Emma said. "
Connect it now," Marcus said. She did. She could see it clearly standing there with the afternoon going along and the light changing outside and the sound of radios from the police cruisers filtering through the glass. The letter to her landlord hadn't been random. Random.
The timing 3 weeks ago, right around when the legal complaint started gaining traction, hadn't been coincidence. They'd been applying pressure from multiple directions at once. The lease, the reputation, and when neither of those moved her, they'd sent Derek. " They've been at this longer than I realized," Emma said. " Yes," Marcus said.
She stood very still with that for a moment. " What do I do?" she said. It wasn't defeat in her voice. It was the specific exhaustion of someone who has been carrying something heavy and has just accurately gauged how much farther there is still to go. "
You don't do anything alone," Marcus said. " That's the first thing. The second thing is that we have a lawyer, a real one, not legal aid, nothing against legal aid, who works with situations exactly like this one, and she is going to call you tomorrow morning." He reached into his pocket and wrote a name and number on the back of one of the business cards Emma kept on the counter. Ironic, she thought, using Derek Holloway's business card to write on.
Her name is Patricia Cho. She's been working on pinnacle adjacent cases for about a year. You're not the only thing she's building. Emma looked at the name on the card. How many cases?
She said. Enough. Marcus said that when your case gets added to the pile, the pile becomes something a judge pays attention to. Emma absorbed this. Across the room, Kayla had finally gotten off the tattoo chair and was standing with Teresa near the window.
The two of them talking in low voices with the particular easy intimacy of people who have been through something together and found each other steady. Kayla had her phone out and was showing Teresa something on the screen and Teresa was nodding and Emma watched them for a moment and felt something specific and nameable in her chest. Those were the people she was doing this for. Not in an abstract way, not in a way that lived only in principles and arguments. In the particular way that lives in actual human faces.
Angela Reyes had been one of those faces. 51 years old, a single mother of two who had taken the job at Pinnacle because it paid $12 more per hour than the alternatives and who had spent four months there before she understood what she was participating in and another four months trying to find a way out. The cover-up tattoo she'd come to Emma for was over a name, a man's name in an old style on the inside of her forearm. She'd never said who it belonged to. Emma had never asked what Angela had said sitting in Emma's chair chair with her sleeve rolled up and the old ink visible beneath the new design Emma was building over.
It was this. I need to tell you something and I need you to actually hear it because I've tried to tell three other people and they all looked at me like I was making it too complicated. Emma had put down her machine. Tell me, she'd said, and Angela told her, the debt collection, the inflated figures, the legal threats that had no legal basis, the elderly woman in Chandler who had paid $11,000 on a debt that had been discharged in bankruptcy four years prior. The veteran in Mesa who had sold his truck.
The single father in Glendale who had taken a second job and missed his daughter's entire school year because the company had told him the alternative was criminal prosecution. None of it was legal. All of it was continuing. Emma had listened to all of it. And then she had said, "Do you still have access to any of the files?"
Angela had looked at her some. Why? Because what you're describing is not just wrong, Emma said. " It's documentable, and documented wrong things are the only kind that change." Angela had been quiet for a moment. "
They'll come after me," she said. " Probably, Emma said, but not alone." That conversation had happened eight months ago in this shop, in this chair, and everything that had followed the calls to legal aid, the quiet coordination with Patricia Cho's office, the careful building of a file that now had 47 cases in it, and more still being added. All of it had started with a woman rolling up her sleeve and trusting that someone in the room would actually listen. Emma thought about all of this standing at her counter while the police finished their report outside and Marcus Callahan wrote Patricia Cho's number on the back of Derek Holloway's business card and the afternoon move slowly toward evening.
She thought about her father who used to say that the most dangerous thing you could do was make yourself someone trusted. Not dangerous in the way fear is dangerous. Dangerous in the way responsibility is dangerous. Because once people trust you, you have to be worthy of it every single day, which is harder than being afraid and longer and ask more of you and never really ends. She thought about the 47 families.