Marcus Patricia said, "You okay?" He said, "I'm okay. I'm Yeah, there's more." She said, "The civil case." With the indictment filed, Callaway's attorneys contacted me this morning. The settlement conversation has changed dramatically. They're not trying to buy your silence anymore. They're trying to limit their exposure in the civil proceeding.
The new discussion is about compensatory damages for wrongful termination, the AR21 retaliation claim, and she paused the possibility of a punitive component given the criminal conduct. He was quiet. What are we talking about? She told him. He sat completely still for a long moment.
That's he started. Yes, she said. I don't need I know you don't need it. She said with the particular patience of a lawyer who had learned that some clients needed to be interrupted at this juncture, but you earned it. You earned every dollar of it, Marcus, with six years of your professional life and two years of documented retaliation and a public firing in front of 40 people and 6 months of rebuilding from nothing.
That number is not charity, it's accountability, it's what accountability costs. He was quiet again. A different kind of quiet from before. I want some of it to go to the flight. 1,147 Passengers.
He said the ones who were injured. I don't know how that works legally, but I want to do that. A long pause. That's we can explore a charitable structure, a fund of some kind. Another pause.
And he could hear her actually moved by this, trying not to show it and not entirely succeeding. I'll look into it. And Hutchkins, Marcus said, and Lena Graves and Theo Park. Whatever I can do to make sure they're protected legally, financially for coming forward, they took a real risk. I'll make that happen, Patricia said.
Her voice was very steady now. The way it got when she was feeling something she was choosing to express through precision rather than display, "Marcus, I have been doing this work for 20 years. I want you to know people like you are why I still do it. He didn't know what to say to that. Thank you, Patricia, he said, for everything.
She cleared her throat. Professional reflex. Don't thank me yet. We still have deposition prep and the actual civil proceedings and about 14 months of process ahead of us. A pause, but today is a good day.
Allow yourself that. He hung up and sat at the kitchen table for a while. A good day, he thought about it. About the Sunday mornings with his pressed church clothes and her voice telling him what he was made for, about her face which he could see clearly even now. Even though she'd been gone for 8 years, the specific expression she got when something confirmed what she already believed.
The I told you so. That wasn't about being right. It was about having always seen the truth before it arrived. He picked up his phone and called Raymond. Raymond answered with I saw the news the DOJ filing Marcus I and then he stopped and Marcus heard something in that stop that Raymond never let through.