What does your legal team say? He said that we fight it and win. Emily said, "Which we will." She paused. "What do you say?" He looked at his hands. The same hands that had lifted crates in the rain on a Thursday afternoon in October when none of this existed yet.
When he was just a man who was late to pick up his daughter and stopped anyway because stopping was the right thing. "I say we fight it," he said. "You sure did, Emily." He met her eyes. He tried to rewrite what I am once. I'm not letting him do it again.
She held his gaze. Good, she said. Because Henry already called our legal team this morning. He's personally funding the defense, he said. She paused and something moved across her face that was equal parts exasperation and love.
He said, and I quote, that he did not spend 50 years building something honest only to let a coward rewrite the last chapter. Marcus stared at her. Then he laughed. Really laughed. Emily watched him laugh with that expression she had.
Now the one that was fully open, fully present, not managed at all, and she smiled, too. The real one that had surprised her in the doorway on the first night, the one that had started all of this. The lawsuit lasted 4 months. Richard Hayes's case collapsed in the pre-trial discovery phase when the Caldwell Group's legal team presented the internal documentation trail, showing that Richard had initiated the unauthorized background check, compiled the misleading document, and distributed it to board members through back channels, all of which was time-stamped sourced and unambiguous. The footage from the equipment yard came in as supplementary evidence.
The judge reviewed it for less than 10 minutes before the ruling. The case was dismissed. Richard Hayes did not appeal. He left Atlanta shortly after. Marcus heard through Darnell, who heard through the Cedar Falls Grapevine, that Richard had taken a position with a company in Texas.
The grapevine had no further opinions on this, and Marcus had none either. He wished Richard Hayes nothing. Not bad, not good, just nothing, which was the appropriate amount of energy to spend on a man who had built his whole purpose around other people's positions and discovered too late that it wasn't a foundation. The day the dismissal came through, Marcus was on a job site in Cedar Falls with his groundwork crew. His phone buzzed with a text from Emily.
It's over. Call me when you're free. He put the phone in his pocket, finished what he was doing. Then he stepped away from the crew and called her. "You okay?" she said.
"Yeah," he said. "You?" "Yes," she said. And then after a pause, "I'm really genuinely yes." "Good." He said, "Dinner tonight." She said, "All of us. Dad's already called Mrs. Greer." "He called Mrs. Greer," Marcus said. "He has her number now." Emily said in the tone of someone who had long since surrendered to the fact that her father operated on a scope she couldn't always track.