"How did it go?" "It's done," she said. "All three conditions are in the resolution." A pause. "The public acknowledgement in writing," she said.
"They'll release it today." Another pause, longer. She heard him exhale not dramatically, just the sound of a man breathing out something he'd been holding in for a long time. "Okay," he said. "Marcus."
She stopped walking. Stood still in the parking garage with her hand on her car door. "I know this doesn't give you back what you lost. I know that. I'm not going to tell you this fixes anything because it doesn't fix the thing that needs fixing most."
He was quiet for a moment. "No," he said, "it doesn't." "But it's the truest thing I could do," she said, "with what I had left." "I know," he said. "I know that, Evelyn."
She got in her car. She sat there for a minute without starting it. Then she said, "What are you doing right now?" "I'm at work," he said. "Under a bus."
She almost laughed. "Of course you are." "You should go home," he said. "Sleep. You've been running on nothing for 4 days."
"I will," she said. She started the car. "Marcus, thank you." "You already said that." "I know," she said.
"I'm saying it again." She drove home. She slept for 11 hours. It was the first real sleep she'd had in 2 weeks. And when she woke up, the world had moved forward without her permission, which was the only way the world ever moved, and she had to decide what to do in the space it had left.
The federal indictment of Gerald Pruitt came down 6 weeks later. 18 counts. Wire fraud, housing fraud, conspiracy, violations of the Fair Housing Act, and three counts of obstruction of justice, covering the destruction of employee documentation, which included Marcus Carter's original compiled records, which the forensic team had been able to partially reconstruct from server backup fragments that Pruitt had believed were permanently deleted. Raymond Holt was named as a co-conspirator on 11 of the 18 counts. Sandra Weiss cooperated with investigators and was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony, which filled in the financial mechanics of the Meridian scheme in a level of detail that Pruitt's defense attorneys spent 3 weeks trying to characterize as unreliable and failed.