For months, Thomas Vale answered through lawyers, which was its own kind of answer. Then, one grey morning well into the second year of it, he came without them.
Cameron was not in the room for that. He was told about it afterward, in the careful language people use when they are giving a powerful man news he cannot act on. Thomas had confirmed the frame of it, all of it, the way Evelyn had laid it out at Grand Central. The order had been Henry's. The evidence against Cameron had been assembled by Henry and fallen apart within six months, and Henry had known it had fallen apart. The child had stayed hidden anyway, because returning her meant surrendering the Mercer interest to trustees Henry did not control. Thomas's own part was in the records he had falsified or buried, in the search he had administered for a decade like a man tending a grave he knew was empty, and in the silence he had kept for two years after Henry's death, when the only person left he was protecting was himself.
There was no murder plot. Cameron had to say that sentence to people more than once, and every time he said it, some part of him was still surprised by it. No one had meant for Caroline to die. A brake line had failed because brake lines sometimes fail. A frightened old man had looked at a coincidence and seen a crime, and then, when the truth arrived, he had looked at his own crime and chosen it. That was the whole of it. It was worse than a conspiracy, in a way. A conspiracy would at least have been grand.
People asked Cameron, in the tones of people who expected a Hale to do something, whether he was satisfied with the pace of it. Whether strings were being pulled. Whether it was true that Thomas Vale would get what was coming to him.
Cameron said the same thing every time. The law moves at its own pace. He intended to let it.
He could not have explained to most of them why it mattered that it be slow and public and ordinary. But Anna was fourteen, and Anna was watching. She had spent ten years inside other people's arrangements, moved by signatures she never saw, protected by silences that had eaten her childhood. Her father was not going to teach her that the answer to lawless men was a richer lawless man. He was going to sit in the bad chairs and answer the same questions a fourth time and let the record say what the record said, where she could read it herself someday and find no fingerprints of his on the outcome.
Sometimes she asked him questions he could not answer.
"What happens to him?" she said once, about Thomas, on a walk neither of them had dressed warmly enough for. "In the end. What actually happens?"
"I don't know," Cameron said.
"You're supposed to know things. It's basically your whole personality."
"I'm expanding," he said, and she snorted, and they walked on, and the not-knowing sat between them without either of them trying to fix it. It was, he thought, the most honest thing he had ever given her.
Chapter 26: What Was Hers
The Mercer question was settled in a different building, in a quieter way, and Cameron insisted on the quiet. No announcements. No cameras. Just a conference room, a new set of lawyers who owed Henry Hale nothing, and a stack of documents that undid, in one afternoon, the arrangement his father had stolen a child to preserve.
The interest was Anna's. That was the first sentence of every conversation, and Cameron made sure it was never treated as a generous concession. It had come to her through Caroline, through the Mercer line, by birth. It had never been his to give, and he said so in front of witnesses, because he wanted it on a record somewhere that he had said it without being asked.
He gave up sole control of her trust in the same set of signatures.
He had expected it to hurt. Henry had treated control of that money as the family's spine, the thing a Hale held or stopped being a Hale. Cameron signed the pages one after another and felt something closer to setting down a weight he had not known he was carrying. Independent trustees would manage the interest until Anna came of age. Strangers with duties instead of relatives with agendas. Anna would be told what things were worth when she was old enough to be told, and she would be able to ask questions of people whose only job was to answer her.
Evelyn took the role of family adviser, which meant she would be in the room and her judgment would be sought and she would hold no power to decide anything alone. She accepted it with the air of a woman who had finished with power and was faintly surprised to find she did not miss it.
Judith declined a role of any kind before anyone had finished offering one.
"I kept a child alive and fed and in school," she said. "That was the job. I don't need a title in a trust to have done it." She said it without bitterness, the way she said most things, and that was the end of it. She went back to Queens and her basil plant, and if she thought about the money at all, no one ever heard about it.
Anna herself sat through exactly one of the meetings, at her own request, and spent most of it looking out of the window at the traffic below.
"So what does it actually mean?" she asked, when the lawyers had finished translating themselves into plain language. "In normal words."
Cameron answered before anyone else could. "It means the money is yours. It means nobody can use it to move you around ever again. And it means when you're grown, it's your problem."