Is it the car? Yeah. People are talking about it? A lot of people. Emma considered this with the gravity she brought to significant information.
Is it going to be okay? Cole thought about what okay meant in the context of the weeks ahead. The lawyers, the disputes, the messy resolution of ownership, the public argument about what the documentation meant, and what Stratton Group had or hadn't known. It was not going to be neat. It was not going to be fast.
It's going to take a while, he said. There's going to be a lot of noise, and some of it's going to be unpleasant, but the evidence is solid. The car is real, and now everybody knows it. He paused. That part is permanent.
You can't unknow a thing once it's known. Emma was quiet for a moment. Marsh wanted it to be known, she said. She'd been listening more than Cole had fully registered over the past weeks. The conversations at the kitchen table, the documents spread out, the shape of the story emerging.
She'd absorbed more of it than he'd intended. Yeah, he said. He did. He didn't get to see it. No.
He didn't. Emma looked at the table for a moment. Then she looked up. But it still happened, even though he didn't see it. A pause.
That means something. Cole looked at his daughter, 8 years old, sitting at a kitchen table in Tucson with flour from someone's after-school baking project still on her sleeve, working through the idea that effort and outcome don't always line up in time, that a person can do the work of making something matter and never see the moment it does. Yeah. He said softly. That means something.