Chapter 5: What She Had Already Set in Motion
Marcus drove Brittany home that night.
He did not hold her hand in the car.
He told me that much later, sitting at my kitchen table with his coat still on and a cup of coffee he had not touched going cold in front of him.
The guests had gone.
Corinne had stayed to help me clean up the frosting, and she had done it quietly, without making it a thing, the way she had been doing difficult things quietly for the thirty years I had known her.
"She's already called someone," Marcus said.
"On the drive home.
I could hear her in the other room when I went to get a glass of water.
She was talking fast.
I couldn't hear the words, but I know that voice.
That's the voice she uses when she's trying to get ahead of something."
"What did you do?" I asked.
"I went back to bed.
And then I lay there for two hours and then I came here."
Corinne set a plate of leftover food in front of him.
He looked at it like he didn't know what it was for.
"Marcus," I said.
"I need to tell you something I should have told you a long time ago."
He looked up.
"I've known about Brittany and Hargrove and Associates for three weeks.
Not everything.
But enough to know something was wrong." I folded my hands on the table.
"An old friend of your father's — a man named Walter Osei, who your father did business with for twenty years — called me.
He said someone had been making inquiries about this property.
He wanted to make sure I knew."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I didn't have proof.
And because I was afraid of what it would do to you."
His jaw worked.
"So you carried it alone."
"I'm seventy years old, Marcus.
I have been carrying things alone since before you were born." I said it without bitterness.
It was just the truth.
"What I didn't know was that she'd already completed the transfer.
I thought I had more time."
Corinne sat down across from him.
"The question right now is what's recoverable."
"Pastor Gideon took a photo of every page in that envelope before he handed it to me," I said.
"He sent copies to his email and printed a set at the church office this afternoon before the party."
Marcus stared at me.
"He knew."
"He suspected.
He wanted me to have a backup that Brittany couldn't reach." I paused.
"He is a thorough man."
"Mama." Marcus put both hands flat on the table.
"Who else knew about this?"
"Walter Osei.
Pastor Gideon.
Corinne, since about forty minutes ago."
Corinne nodded without looking up from her coffee.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
He was quiet for a moment.
Outside the window the street was dark and the neighborhood was still, and somewhere two houses down a dog was barking at nothing.
"She's going to say I knew," Marcus said.
"She's going to say I was part of it.
That's what the lawyer on the phone is for.
She's building a story right now."
I looked at my son.
"Then we need to move faster than her story," I said.
He picked up his coffee cup.
Put it back down.
"Walter Osei — does he have documentation?
From when the inquiries were made?"
"He has emails."
Something shifted in Marcus's face.
Not hope exactly.
More like a man finding solid ground under his foot when he expected mud.
"I need his number," he said.
I had it written on a notecard in the kitchen drawer.
May you like
I had put it there three weeks ago.
I got up and got it.
