Viven used it. By January, she was doing things he hadn't asked her to do because she'd seen they needed doing and had done them. Reinforcing the chicken coupe insulation, which he'd been meaning to address since November. Tracking the feed inventory with a precision that saved them two trips to town in the worst weather. Teaching Elsie to read with a patience that Gideon, who had been trying to teach Elsie to read for six months with limited success, recognized as being considerably better than his own method.
He'd found them at the kitchen table one afternoon, Elsie sounding out words from an old almanac with her tongue between her teeth and her whole body concentrated, and Viven sitting beside her saying nothing when Elsie got it right, which turned out to be the right method. Not praise, just expectant silence and Elsie filling it. How did you know to do it that way? He asked Vivien that evening. She hates being patronized.
Viven said, "Praise tells her you expected her to fail. Just waiting tells her you expected her to get it. " He thought about that for a while. Then he thought about all the ways he'd been handling Elsie since Clara died, and about whether expectation and patience looked the same from the outside, and about how much difference there was between them on the inside. Parenting, it turned out, was something two people could be better at than one. He hadn't expected that.
He'd thought he had the essential shape of it down, and the shape was right, but there were dimensions to it he'd been managing alone that he hadn't known were being managed alone until they weren't. The wire from Hargreavve came in the third week of January. Sims wrote it out himself again, which had become his pattern for important communications. And this time, he came in for coffee and sat at the table with the look of a man delivering news. He was genuinely pleased to deliver.
The second of Harland Aldicott's witnesses had provided a full statement to the Philadelphia court. The man's name was Corvin, and he had been in Harlland's employee for 4 years, and he had decided be for reasons that Hargreav's wire did not detail, but that Sims speculated involved either his conscience or the calculation that the losing side of a fraud case was a worse place to be than a cooperating witness, to describe in precise detail the circumstances under which the forged document had been created. Edmund Aldicott had not signed it. He had been shown a different document, a routine business amendment, and had signed that. And his signature had been transferred by a process that Corin described with specificity to the actual fraudulent will amendment.
Harlon had been present. Fletcher had coordinated the clerical work. That's fraud, Sims said. Not arguable fraud. Documented, witnessed fraud with a cooperating witness who was in the room.
Viven sat at the kitchen table and read through the wire summary Sims had written out for her, reading it twice in the careful way she read things that mattered. Harlland's attorney has already approached Hargreavve about a settlement, Sims continued. They want to avoid criminal prosecution. Hargreav thinks they'll accept terms that give Harlland a severance from the business and no criminal charges filed in exchange for formally withdrawing the fraudulent document and any claims against the estate. Lecher?