Vivien asked. Vivien, that's the part your attorney is still negotiating. Fletcher was more directly involved than Harlon in the actual mechanics of it. Hargreav thinks he'll push for the same deal. No prosecution in exchange for withdrawal.
Whether you accept that is your decision. She set down the paper. She looked at the window, which was frosted at the edges with the crystallin patterns of serious cold, and she was quiet for a long moment in the way that meant she was thinking something through completely before she said it. I don't want them in prison, she said. She said it like she'd expected to want it and had found she didn't.
I want them out. Out of the business, out of the estate, gone. I don't want to spend the next 3 years in courtrooms watching Fletcher's attorney try to make me look unstable. She looked at Sims. Tell Hargrieve to negotiate the settlement with conditions.
What conditions? That the original will is reinstated in the record without contest. That Harlland signs a statement confirming the amendment was fraudulent for the permanent record even if it's sealed and that Croft is recalled today. Sims wrote this down. Those are reasonable terms.
Hargreav will know how to present them. He looked up. This is close to over, Miss Aldicott. She nodded. She looked at the paper again, at the neat hand of Sims's summary, at the outline of 6 months of fear and running and hiding, reduced to a few lines of practical legal language.
"Thank you," she said. "For all of it. " "I represent your interest," Sims said with the slight discomfort of a practical man being thanked directly. "That's what I'm paid for. " He gathered his papers and took his leave, and the door closed behind him, and the kitchen was quiet. Gideon was at the stove. He hadn't said anything through the meeting.
It was her business, her situation, her decisions to make. But he'd been there, and she'd known he was there, and that had been its own kind of thing. "It's over," she said. "Not to him exactly. To the room. " "Almost," he said.