Neither do I. Marcus said another pause. Marcus, she said this story, the right version of it told. Honestly, it's not bad. It's actually important.
A man inside a company uses institutional tools to attack a private individual's reputation and it gets corrected because someone noticed and someone else had the footage that told the truth. She paused. That's a story worth telling. It puts us in public, Marcus said. Yes, she said.
It does. You okay with that? A pause longer than the others. Are you? she said. He thought about Lily, about the poster board with the photographs arranged so everyone was visible, about what it meant to step into something openly instead of managing it from a careful distance.
Yeah, he said, I'm okay with it. Then let's talk to Owen Patrick together, Emily said. Both of us on the record. That's going to be a thing, Marcus said. It already is a thing, she said.
We might as well make sure it's the right thing. He almost laughed. You sound like someone I know, he said. Who? My daughter, he said.
She'd tell you there's a difference between doing something and doing it right. Emily was quiet for a moment. She's right, she said softly. She usually is. They met Owen Patrick the following afternoon at a coffee shop in Cedar Falls.
Marcus' territory, Tori, his choice, which he hadn't announced as deliberate, and which Emily had recognized immediately as deliberate. Owen was in his mid-40s, compact and attentive with a reporter's specific quality of being able to be completely still without seeming passive. He had a recorder. He asked if he could use it. Marcus said yes.
Emily said yes. They talked for 2 hours. Marcus told the Brentwell story in full for the first time in public, not the version Richard had shaped, the actual version, the reports, the meeting with Gareth Wills, the decision, the drive back to Cedar Falls. He told it without drama because it hadn't been dramatic. It had just been a choice, and choices weren't usually dramatic from the inside.
Emily talked about the corporate culture at the Caldwell Group, about Richard Hayes, about what the board meeting had revealed about how institutional power protected itself. She was precise and fair. She didn't demonize Richard beyond what was accurate, which Owen seemed to find both surprising and notable. At some point, Owen looked up from his recorder and said, "Can I ask something off the record?" They both nodded. How did this, he gestured between them, actually start, not the corporate stuff.