Two went to trial and lost. Luther was sentenced to 4 years with eligibility for supervised release after 30 months. Regg Hollander received a reduced sentence for his cooperation. The Meridian executives received various outcomes that their respective attorneys characterized as victories and that objective observers characterized as appropriate. Octavia said very little about any of it publicly.
She attended the hearings that required her presence and did not attend the ones that didn't. And she gave her victim impact statement in a flat, precise voice that made two jurors visibly uncomfortable, and that the financial press replayed extensively because it contained its final two sentences the most concise description of corporate predation anyone had delivered on record that year. She did not look at Luther when she delivered it. Cade attended the sentencing hearing. He sat in the gallery three rows back and Octavia didn't know he was coming because he hadn't told her.
He arrived after she was already seated and left before the room fully cleared. And she found out he'd been there 3 days later when a courthouse reporter mentioned it in a sidebar piece. She called him that evening. You were there? She said, "Yeah, you didn't tell me.
I didn't want you thinking about me when you needed to think about other things." A pause. That's either very considerate or slightly maddening. Probably both, he said. She was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line.
He could hear the particular quality of her silence. He'd learned to read her silences over the past months, the way you learn to read weather in a place you'd lived long enough. This one was the kind that had something underneath it that she was deciding how to handle. Thank you, she said finally, for being there. I know how long you waited for that day, he said.
Seemed like something you shouldn't have to sit through with only attorneys for company. Another pause longer cade. Her voice had something in it he didn't hear often. Something less processed, less managed. Do you understand that almost no one in my life would have the thought to do that?
He didn't know what to say to that. So, he said the honest thing. That's a problem with your life, not a virtue in me. She made a sound that was halfway to a laugh and halfway to something else. Saturday, she said.
I want to take you and Brin somewhere if she's amendable. Where the estate? She said it's been a year almost exactly. I had the restoration completed last month. They finished the east wing damage, the window, the generator room.
Everything. A pause. I want to go back and have it be different than it was. He understood that. He understood it better than she probably expected him to.
I'll ask Brin, he said. Brin's response when he asked was characteristically Brin. She looked up from the book she was reading, thought about it for approximately 4 seconds, and said, "Is the heating fixed?" " I fixed it myself," he said personally. " Then yes," she said, and went back to her book.
The drive up the mountain on a Saturday morning in November was a different experience than it had been a year ago. Different sky, high and clear. The particular blue that came after the season had committed to cold, but before the serious snow arrived. Different road fully plowed, sand grit along the edges, no drama in the guardrails. Brin sat in the back seat with her book and her earbuds in, one earbud out so she could hear if spoken to, which was her standard configuration for car trips of any length.
Octavia met them at the gate. She was standing outside the gate rather than waiting inside it, which Cade noticed and didn't remark on. She was in a dark coat and boots, her hair down, and she had the look of someone who had been waiting for a few minutes and had filled the time by thinking rather than by checking her phone. Brin took the earbud out when she saw her. " Hi," Brin said through the open window. "
Hi," Octavia said. " Your gate is taking a long time to open." " I know it's been doing that. I have someone coming to look at it." " My dad could probably fix it," Brin said. "
Not as a compliment, exactly. as a fact. " Brin," Cade said, "What he could?" Octavia looked at Cade with an expression that was doing several things at once. " I'm sure he could," she said.
The gate finished its slow arc, and Cade pulled through. The estate looked different in November daylight than it had in a blizzard. The obvious thing to say was that it looked better, and it did, but it also looked more human. The storm had stripped something from it, or maybe the year had. It looked like a place that had been through something and was still standing, which Cade found more interesting than the pristine version he'd arrived at the first time.
The east wing was fully repaired, new window, new exterior, stonework where the door had been forced, fresh timber work on the shed roof. You could see where the new material met the old if you knew to look. Cade knew to look. He looked, and he thought that the seams were visible in a way that wasn't quite invisible and wasn't quite ugly. just present, just honest.
Brin spent the first 40 minutes exploring with the focused energy of someone conducting an inspection. She examined every room she was permitted to enter with the same measuring attention she brought to everything, asking questions that were either completely practical, why is this ceiling higher than the other one? What's that pipe for? How old is this lock? Or completely unexpected.
Did you always live here alone? Do you like it better in winter or summer? What do you do when you want to be outside, but it's raining? Octavia answered every question, not with the patient condescension that some adults applied to children, offering simplified versions of real thoughts. She answered the way she answered everything directly with more information than the question technically required.