Willa nodded, held the folder against her chest for a moment, then asked whether they could finish the truck before they went anywhere. She did not trust herself to sit quietly, and there were still bolts that needed tightening on a vehicle somebody expected to drive home. Reese understood. He told her the lawyer could wait until the service work was done, and he went back to his office to make the call while Willa rolled beneath the truck again.
Callum Burke was in Sudbury, a lawyer Reese had known for years through a pair of disputes involving the garage's commercial lease and a defective parts shipment. He was not the sort of attorney who promised results over the phone. He asked for copies of everything, including the envelope and the circumstances under which it had been found, then said he would need to meet Willa before deciding whether he could represent her. When Reese explained that she had already been turned away by two lawyers, Callum replied that being turned away and having no case were not the same thing.
They left Coldmare the next morning in Reese's truck. Fig offered to drive, and Sark said he would come along if anybody expected trouble, but Reese declined both offers. Willa had chosen to speak to an attorney, not to arrive with an escort that would turn the visit into a declaration of war. They put the protective folder in a document case between the seats, and Willa carried her own USB drive in a small pouch she kept inside her jacket.
The highway ran through flat fields, stands of bare trees, and long patches of forest whose dark trunks looked almost black against the thin snow along the shoulders. Willa watched trucks coming the other way and remembered the trip she had made with her father when she was fourteen, hauling a rebuilt motorcycle north for a customer who was afraid to put it on an open trailer. Grant had talked the whole way about how mechanical work changed between countries and climates, then let her choose where they stopped for lunch. She had picked a place with terrible sandwiches because the sign outside promised the largest milkshakes on the highway.
"He once took me north to deliver a bike," she said after half an hour. "He made me explain every noise the truck made. I couldn't get away with falling asleep because he'd ask what I thought about the transmission."
Reese smiled. "That sounds like Grant."
"He was trusting," she said. "Everybody says that like it was the thing that made him weak. But he knew engines better than anybody I ever met, and he knew when a customer was lying about how a bike had been treated. He just couldn't imagine a business partner would use his illness against him."
"Trust isn't a defect," Reese said. "Sometimes the person who abuses it wants you to think it is, because then nobody looks at the abuse."