Chapter 69: The Weakest Link
Devon read the report twice before he stood up.She’s committed. Confirmed through her son.
Sixteen days of watching Liam had told him nothing. Two conversations between a lonely man and a resentful boy had told him everything.
He sat with that a moment longer than he needed to, the folder closed under his palm, turning over how close he’d come to spending the rest of this case looking in exactly the wrong direction.
He found Harrison in his office, still going over trial notes, unbothered, a man who hadn’t yet learned the ground under him had shifted.
"Grace is going to testify."
Harrison didn’t look up right away. "She’s been threatening to for months. She won’t."
"She will." Devon set the folder down between them. "Confirmed. Not from watching her. From someone close enough to know before she’s said it to anyone else."
The laugh he’d started died in his throat.I told you she was broken.She was. Then what changed. Probably Liam happened.
Harrison stood, slow, and for a long moment said nothing at all. Then he picked up the glass paperweight off his desk and threw it at the wall. It cracked the plaster and dropped, unbroken, to the floor, and neither of them moved to pick it up.
"I want her stopped," he said, low now instead of loud, which was somehow worse. "I don’t care what it takes."
"Not physically." Devon’s voice stayed level. "I won’t do that, and neither will anyone I put on this."
"I didn’t ask you to touch her. I asked you to stop her. Legally. Financially. However." His jaw was tight. "I cannot have her in that courtroom, Devon. Do you understand what happens to me if she takes that stand?"
Devon nodded once, filing the boundary away without arguing it further, and let a beat of quiet settle before he answered.
"People don’t change their minds because of pressure," he said, half to himself. "Pressure just makes them dig in. People change because someone they love asks them to."
"Give me the day," he said, and left before Harrison could ask what that meant.
Patricia was already laughing when Liam walked into the small office above the dry cleaner’s, the smell of steam and starch drifting faintly up through the floorboards.
Rowena has hired her to be his lawyer.
"Whitfield," she said, by way of explanation, sliding a printed docket across the desk without looking up. "I saw his name on the filing this morning. Should’ve guessed Harrison would spend the money to get him."
"You know him."Everyone in this city who’s practiced law longer than five years knows him. She leaned back in her chair, arms crossed. "I sat second chair against him once.
Watched him take apart a witness so gently the man actually thanked him for it afterward. Didn’t even realize what had happened to his own testimony until the verdict came back and by then it was far too late to matter."
"That’s supposed to make me feel better?"
"No." She almost smiled. "It’s supposed to make you understand why I’m not underestimating him, and why you shouldn’t either."
She tapped the folder Liam had brought in, thick now with everything Rowena had helped assemble. "This is good work. It’s not enough on its own.
Documents rarely are. But paired with a witness willing to say what they mean out loud, in front of a jury, this becomes very hard to look past."
"And if the witness doesn’t show?"
Something passed behind her eyes, quick and unreadable. "Then it’s a harder case. We work with what we have."
"He’s going to make me look reckless in that room."Yes. That’s the job, and he’s very good at it." She met his eyes, steady.
"Your job is to sit still and let the paper do the talking. He wants a reaction out of you. Give him nothing. The moment you look rattled, that’s the story he needed you to tell for him."
Liam nodded, and didn’t mention that staying still had never once been the hard part for him.Marcus’s phone rang a little past four.
"Change of plans," Devon said, no preamble. "Stop gathering information. Convince him."
"Convince him of what."That letting her testify is the worst thing he’ll ever let happen to her. That he’s the only one who can stop it. I don’t care what story gets him there.
"And if he won’t."He will." Devon’s voice didn’t waver. "He has had enough with his mom doing stuff that spoils his image.
The call ended. Marcus sat with the phone a moment, then looked down at the thin file open on the table in front of him, Damien’s photograph clipped to the corner. An ordinary, tired face that had no idea what was coming for it.
He typed the message without letting himself think too long about it.
Got time tonight? I think you deserve to hear the whole story. Not the pieces. All of it.
He sent it and didn’t follow up. A second message would have looked like pressure, and pressure wasn’t the job tonight.
Damien read it standing in his kitchen, one hand flat on the counter like he needed something solid under it.
He thought about the money that had started landing on a schedule now, easy, almost forgettable once it hit his account.
He thought about the calls he’d let go to voicemail that week, his mother’s voice sounding smaller each time, though he’d told himself that was just tiredness on her end, nothing to do with him.
Where, he typed back, almost a full minute later.Marcus was already at the café when Damien arrived, the same corner table, two coffees ordered before Damien had even sat down.
"You said the whole story," Damien said, dropping into the chair across from him. "So tell it."
Marcus told him. Not everything. Enough. The lawsuit. What it would cost Grace to stand up in that courtroom and say the things she meant to say.
What it would cost Damien, carrying her name and his own through whatever came after, every headline, every stranger who’d decide they knew something about him just from knowing whose son he was.
By the time Marcus finished, Damien wasn’t arguing anymore. He sat there with his coffee going cold, turning something over that felt, from the inside, less like being convinced and more like finally being understood.
"What would that even look like," he said finally, quieter than before.Marcus smiled, small, patient. "We’ll figure it out together."
Devon read the message twenty minutes later, standing at his office window, the city already going dark below him.He’s in. Didn’t even need to push hard.