PART 19:

He looked in on her briefly, a habit he’d had since she was small, this checking, this quiet confirmation, and then went to the shop and sat in the dark for a while before going to bed. He was not done deciding, but he was close. Victoria Sinclair came back to the property the following weekend as she’d said she would.

She came alone this time, which was different from both previous visits. No Marcus Web, no Ranata, just her in the same boot she’d worn the first time he’d seen her on this property, with a camera and a notebook. He met her at the end of the lane. It was a Saturday morning, already warm in the way that Kentucky June insists upon, and the property looked different in summer than it had in any other season he’d been here.

The vegetation fuller, the treeine denser, the whole place more alive and somehow less sad than it had seemed in the gray months. “Morning,” he said. “Morning.” She looked past him at the farm. “The place has changed since October.” “The lane’s a little better,” he said. I had it graded in the spring.

They walked in together. The car was under its tarp where it had been since the inspection. He pulled the tarp back and she stood looking at it for a moment before she started working. She was methodical as she’d been the time before, but there was something different in her approach now. Less the efficiency of a professional assessment and more the attention of someone who is documenting something they understand the full weight of.

She photographed the frame, the door jamb, the partial VIN, the roof line from six angles. She made notes in her notebook and handwriting that he caught a glimpse of and that was small and dense and organized in a way that suggested she wrote quickly and trusted her own shortorthhand. After about an hour, she sat on the cleared ground near the rear of the car and made notes, and Ethan sat on an overturned crate nearby, and there was a comfortable silence between them that neither of them felt the need to fill immediately.

I talked to Marcus,” she said without looking up from the notebook. “About about the third appraiser, the consultant,” she paused. “His name is Dale Puit. He’s been doing independent consulting for 12 years. He also has a long-standing financial relationship with Raymond Hollis’s acquisition company.

” She looked up, which Marcus knew. Ethan was quiet. He didn’t know the scope of it. She said he knew Puit and Hollis had a professional relationship. He didn’t know the full nature of it or that it created a conflict of interest relevant to this specific assessment. She paused. That’s what he says. What do you think? She looked at her notebook.

I think Marcus is a careful, thorough professional who is very good at not knowing things that would be uncomfortable to know. She said it without venom, just as a fact, which is different from lying, but it’s also not nothing. What are you going to do about it? He’s no longer on my appraisal team. She said it simply.

Puit is blacklisted from our process and I’m rewriting our conflict of interest disclosure requirements for consultants which should have been tighter than they were. Will that cost you some relationships? She said some business probably in the short term. Hollis has a long reach. She looked at him. That’s not a reason not to do it.

He’d heard her say that before in a different context. It appeared to be a genuine principle rather than something she said for effect. How’s your company holding up? He said after the statement mixed a slight compression of her mouth that wasn’t quite a smile. The industry press was predictable.

Some people appreciated the cander. Some people wrote that it was an admission of incompetence. The clients, she paused. The serious clients, the ones whose business I actually care about, most of them respect that we corrected the record publicly. The ones who don’t, she shrugged. They were probably not long-term clients anyway.

That’s a sanguin way to look at losing business. It’s the accurate way, she said. I found that the accurate way and the sanguin way line up more often than people think if you have a long enough time horizon. He thought about that. You built the company yourself. She looked at him slightly sideways.

It was a mild look, but it contained something. Awareness that the conversation had moved into different territory. I did, she said. My father was in the industry auction side. He died when I was 24 and left me a company that was deeply in debt and had three employees. She paused. I had a business degree and a lot of stubbornness and basically no plan.

How long did it take to get it to where it is now? 7 years. To get it to where I wasn’t lying awake at 3:00 in the morning convinced it was going to collapse. A bit longer than that. He nodded. He understood the specific texture of that anxiety. The 3 in the morning variety. The one that doesn’t respond to logic because it isn’t about logic.

Your daughter, she said, she’s 15, just turned 16. She’s been involved in all of this. Not operationally, but she’s been present. He looked at the car. She’s the one who told me to stop circling around it and actually do something back when I was still deciding whether to approach your company. Victoria looked at him.

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