Lahat ng Kabanata ng Rebirth; it’s too late, Dear ex: Kabanata 101 - Kabanata 110

Kara’s POV. “You have to actually tell people,” Xavier said at breakfast the next morning. “I told Vivienne,” I said. “She found out on her own but I confirmed it.” “Ashford doesn’t know,” he said. “Maren doesn’t know. Frances doesn’t know.” He paused. “Adaeze knows. You called Adaeze from the cemetery and presumably she told Emmanuel and Chiamaka.” “I told Chiamaka in person yesterday,” I said. “How did she respond?” “She looked at the ring and said he sounds like someone who pays the right kind of attention.” Xavier was quiet for a moment. Then: “I like her.” “You’ll like her more when you meet her,” I said. “She has our grandmother’s assessment quality. She gives you one look and she’s done and you can tell which way it went by whether she says anything after.” “And she said he pays the right kind of attention,” he said. “Which means you passed,” I said. He looked pleased in the quiet way he looked pleased when something mattered. I called Ashford first. He answered on

Kara’s POV. “Six weeks,” Xavier said when I told him that night. “Then eight months to trial. Then spring for the wedding.” “It fits,” I said. “Barely,” he said. “It fits,” I said again. “Everything is going to run at the same time. That is simply what the next year looks like.” He looked at me across the kitchen table. “You’re not worried about the deposition,” he said. Not a question. “I’m not,” I said. “What they’re trying to do is make me defend every decision as if it were legally suspect. But none of the decisions were legally suspect. Every choice I made in building the foundation and the wall was legitimate and documented and made with explicit awareness of the boundaries.” I paused. “My father taught me how to build a record without knowing he was teaching me. Every decision we made at the foundation was recorded. Why we made it. What principle it was based on. What it was designed to do.” “You have been keeping documentation of the documentation,” Xavier said. “Yes,”

Kara’s POV. “A prior relationship with me,” I said. “That was never disclosed.” “That’s what she claims,” Vivienne said. Xavier was watching my face. “What’s her name?” I asked. Vivienne told me. The name was not familiar. I did not know a woman by that name from Slate’s legal team or from any period of my life that I could immediately place. “Tell me everything you have,” I said. “She filed a witness declaration tonight,” Vivienne said. “Her name is Patricia Hollins. She says she was a junior attorney at one of Slate’s related firms twenty years ago. She says she has internal documentation showing that the foundation’s intake methodology was specifically modeled on a legal strategy she developed for a different case, and that this methodology was designed to be emotionally manipulative.” I went still. “Patricia Hollins,” I said. “You recognize the name,” Vivienne said. “She was one of our first clients,” I said. “The company. Not the foundation. She came on board in the ea

Kara’s POV. “All three hundred and one families,” I said. “Full acknowledgment.” “That’s what they’re offering,” Vivienne said quietly. “Named acknowledgment in the settlement document for every plaintiff. Each company recognized by name. The builders clause language. The formal finding that the businesses were legitimate and deliberately targeted.” She paused. “And financial restitution on a scale that is significantly larger than the initial offer.” I looked at the courtroom. Three days of evidence. The full record. Frances’s founding documents. My father’s drive. Joseph Osei’s testimony from two days ago, which had been the most quietly powerful thing I had ever witnessed in a legal proceeding. An eighty-four-year-old man describing in specific careful detail what it had been like to watch his grandmother’s business disappear in 1963. The jury had been still the entire time he spoke. Greer had seen that. Greer’s client had seen it. “What do the plaintiff families want?” I as

Kara’s POV. “Someone taught Calloway,” I said. “And that person was doing it before she was.” “Yes,” Gerald Obi said. “The documentation in Calloway’s earliest files references a man she calls her mentor. She doesn’t name him directly but there are initials. H.W. He appears in three of the founding documents.” A pause. “She describes him as someone who showed her the architecture. Who taught her how the shell company structure worked. Who explained how the transfer method could be made legally invisible.” Another pause. “Kara. If Calloway was defrauded by this man in the early fifties and then built her own version of what he did, the original operation predates everything we’ve documented.” I was standing in the foundation lobby with the city outside and three hundred families somewhere in the process of receiving acknowledgment and Constance Webb’s box sitting unopened in a house in Queens for sixty years. “How far back?” I asked. “We don’t know yet,” he said. “But I want access