Willa nodded as if she had understood him, then stopped in the hallway because her legs seemed unwilling to carry her farther. She stood beside a window looking out at a line of buses moving through the gray morning. People walked past with files and coats and paper cups, each carrying a problem important enough to have brought them there. The building went on being a building, indifferent to the fact that the world had changed for one person standing near the window.
Callum waited without rushing her. At last Willa looked down at the folder in her hands and said, "He left me something that worked."
"He did," Callum answered. "And you did the work of making sure it could be heard. Don't forget that part."
She tried to say something else and found she could not. Her father had driven more than two hundred kilometers while sick, carrying papers he hoped might outlive him. She had walked into a garage in the rain with nothing but a backpack and her knowledge of engines. Between those two journeys lay every day she had wondered whether the truth was only a story people told when they had the money to enforce it. The judgment did not give back her father. It did mean he had not been entirely helpless at the end.
She called Reese as soon as she could speak clearly. He had been waiting in the truck across the street, where he had promised to stay rather than fill the hallway with unnecessary attention. She told him the court had approved the order. For the first time since he met her, her voice broke on a single word, and she had to clear her throat before repeating it. "We won," she said.
Reese closed his eyes. He thought of Grant standing in the garage, thinner than he should have been, asking the people there to hold something for him. "He'd be proud of you," Reese said.
"You don't know that," Willa replied softly.
"I knew him well enough to know what he would have called a job done right. You checked the facts, you didn't lie to make it easier, and you stayed until the work was finished. I think he'd recognize that."
When they reached Coldmare that afternoon, Willa asked Reese to drop her at the garage rather than the bakery. She still had a sportster on the lift, and the owner had been promised an update before closing. Reese tried to tell her the motorcycle could wait one more day. Willa shook her head and said that she had spent enough months being only the woman with a court case. She wanted to finish something that had been hers to do since morning.
Sark was working in the next bay when she rolled beneath the sportster on the creeper. Fig watched from the parts counter with his arms crossed. Brody made three attempts to tidy the same drawer without actually moving anything useful, then gave up and stood beside the coffee machine. They had all known Reese was taking Willa to Sudbury, and all three had been trying not to look at the wall clock since lunch.