She agreed to review the documents before discussing a fee. King drove Sarah to her office on Wednesday because her car had stalled twice on the way to the diner that morning, and because he wanted to make sure she arrived without having to calculate the cost of parking downtown. Patricia met them in a conference room with three folders already waiting on the table. She introduced herself, asked Sarah whether Lily was safe, and then said, "Now tell me the whole story, starting with the first letter. Don't leave out the parts you think make you look foolish."
Sarah spent two hours describing the marriage, the disputed business registration, the visits, the fees, and the night Marcus received the note. Patricia listened closely, asked precise questions, and stopped her only when a date or number needed clarification. When Sarah reached the moment Darius mentioned Lily, Patricia's pencil stopped moving for several seconds. She wrote the words exactly as Sarah remembered them, then looked up and asked if anyone else had been present.
"Nobody," Sarah said. "But he did it more than once." Patricia nodded and turned to the next page, as though she had already decided there was enough to justify looking much more closely. She did not promise that the case would be easy. She promised to determine what was real and what had been invented.
The first discrepancy appeared that afternoon. The registration on which Voss relied named a business venture Greg had attempted during the marriage, but the document Darius described as a personal guarantee did not match the filing retained in another public archive. The names were the same, and the printed language looked similar, yet the page containing Sarah's purported signature had not been part of the earliest available copy. Patricia asked an associate to obtain the filing history and sent a preservation notice demanding that Voss Recovery Solutions retain every version of the relevant document.
By Thursday, she had found another problem. Payments Sarah had made were listed in the collection system, but the company had repeatedly added administrative charges without a clear contractual basis. The figure Darius demanded as immediate settlement remained essentially unchanged despite months of money leaving Sarah's account. Patricia spread the statements across the conference table and began building a second timeline, one that reflected what Sarah had actually paid rather than what Darius claimed she still owed.
On Friday morning, Patricia called Sarah before the diner opened. "I have good news," she said, "and I don't want you to misunderstand what it means. I believe the guarantee was forged, and I believe we can prove it. We have work to do before a judge agrees, but you are not imagining what happened to you."
Sarah sat on Patrick's old office chair with the telephone pressed to her ear. For a moment she could not speak. After months of men telling her that a printed document mattered more than her memory, hearing someone say the words she had been trying to say all along felt almost physically strange.
"What do I owe you?" she asked finally. Patricia told her that the office would take the matter through a contingent-fee arrangement subject to written terms, with help from a legal support fund for expenses that could not be recovered immediately. Sarah would receive the agreement in writing, and nothing would be hidden behind vague promises. "You will know what every dollar is for," Patricia said. "I think you've had quite enough of the other kind of accounting."