Chapter 5

Curtis didn't sit.

He looked at the drawing in Marcus's hands, then at the envelope on the linen, then at the room - forty faces, some soft with sympathy, some sharp with suspicion, all of them waiting. He had spent eighteen years mopping floors and emptying trash cans in a building full of children, and he knew what it looked like when a room decided something about you before you opened your mouth.

"I shouldn't have come," he said.

The words landed like a dropped glass.

"I told them I shouldn't come. I told them to mail it. They said no. They said it had to be me." He reached for the envelope. "I'll go. I didn't mean to make a scene. I just wanted to say thank you."

Marcus didn't move. "Thank me?"

"For the school," Curtis said. "For the gym. You paid for it. The new floor, the bleachers. They said it was anonymous, but the principal knew. She told me. She said you've been sending money to Roosevelt for twenty years."

A chair scraped at the second table. A man in a charcoal suit - board member, fifties, silver watch, the kind of face that had never had to wait for anything - leaned forward. His name was Philip Vance, and he had been on the Whitfield Freight board for eleven years.

"Marcus," Vance said. "I know this is an emotional moment. But we have to be careful. We don't know this man. We don't know why he's here tonight, of all nights. The timing is-"

"The timing is because I'm old," Curtis said.

He said it without heat. He said it the way he had said everything all evening, quiet and unhurried, a man who had long ago stopped needing to win arguments.

"I'm seventy-four. The school is renaming the gym in March. They asked me to deliver the invitation because I'm the only one who knew you. I wrote to your company four times. 1994, 2003, 2011, and 2019. I never got an answer. I figured you were busy. I figured you'd moved on. That's fine. That's how it should be. But when the school asked me to bring the envelope, I said yes because I wanted to see you one time before I couldn't anymore."

The room was silent.

Marcus's face had gone very still. "What letters?"