The older cousin who had made calls and connected attorneys and told him to let the echo arrive. I'm proud of you, Raymon said. I need you to hear that. I am so proud of you. Marcus closed his eyes.
Thank you, he said, for being the person I called that first night. That's what we do, Raymond said simply. That's what family does. He sat with that for a moment after the call ended. Then he got up, went to the garage, and fixed the alternator he'd been halfway through on Saturday.
He did it with the same precision he brought to everything. Methodical, careful, no shortcuts. When it was done, he tested it, confirmed it was right, and put his tools away clean. He picked up Zoe from school. She got in the truck and said, "Did something happen?
You look different. The man who fired me got indicted today," he said. She considered this for a moment with the seriousness it deserved. "What does indicted mean exactly? It means the government officially charged him with a crime because of what he did to the airplanes.
Because of what he did to the airplanes and because he lied about it afterward, she nodded slowly. So he got caught. He got caught. Marcus said another silence. Then with the definitive tone of someone rendering a verdict.
Good. He looked at her sideways. She was looking straight ahead through the windshield, chin slightly lifted, jaw set his grandmother's jaw. He'd always thought. Same line, same resolve.
Yeah, he said. Good. That evening, he knocked on Diane's door. She opened it and looked at him and said, I know. I saw it on the news 3 hours ago, and I've been waiting for you to knock ever since.
He laughed, walked in, sat at the table he'd been sitting at for months now. The table that had become one of the fixed points of his life without his having planned for that to happen. And she sat across from him and said, "Tell me how you actually feel. Not the version you told Patricia. Not the version you told Raymond.
The actual one." He looked at her relieved, he said. Not because he got caught, although that matters. But because he stopped finding the words because they weren't easy ones. Because the 43 memos were real. Because I wasn't crazy.
Because I spent 2 years filing documents into a machine that was designed to make me feel like I was overreacting. Being difficult, not a team player. And now a federal grand jury has confirmed in a criminal indictment that I was right. He paused. That's what the relief is, not revenge.