Marcus told her at breakfast. He waited until she had set down her coffee, because Rosa Hale believed that serious things should be said to a person who was fully awake and holding nothing hot.
"Grandma," he said, "I want to represent you."
Rosa stared at him. "Baby, you are thirteen."
"I am also admitted to the bar of this state, with limited admission granted by the supreme court." He said it the way he had rehearsed it upstairs, evenly, like a fact about the weather. "No lawyer in this county will take the case. That leaves me."
"Marcus—"
"The condemnation fails the public-use test, the council lacked the supermajority the charter requires, and the notice was defective. I can win this."
She looked at him for a long time—at the boy in his uncle's suit, at the man the suit was trying to make room for. Then she did what she always did when she needed to think: she pressed the little wooden cross into her palm and closed her eyes.
"What does your professor say?" she asked at last.
Professor Lydia Marsh said it was madness. She said it standing in her office doorway at Ashford, arms folded, the afternoon light catching the silver in her hair. She had mentored Marcus through law school—through the nights when a ten-year-old did torts homework at her kitchen table—and she loved him the way teachers love the student who makes the work feel worth it.
"Marcus, Victor Crane has forgotten more about eminent domain than most lawyers ever learn. You are thirteen years old. The judge will eat you alive, the press will make a circus of it, and if you lose, your grandmother loses her home and you carry that for the rest of your life."
"I know," Marcus said.
"Do you? Because I am not sure you know what it costs to lose someone else's case."
He was quiet. Then: "Professor, do you remember what you told me when I passed the bar? You said the license was not a prize. You said it was a tool, and tools are for using."
Lydia Marsh closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was smiling, reluctantly, the way people smile when they have lost an argument they are proud to lose. "I am going to regret saying that for the rest of my career."
"You will help me prepare?" he asked.
"I will help you prepare," she said. "And Marcus—file your appearance today. Before they can argue you are not counsel, be counsel."
She crossed to her bookshelf and pulled down a thick, battered treatise on eminent domain, its spine cracked from decades of use. "My copy. Crane wrote the foreword, if you can believe it. Read the chapter on public use twice." She held it out, then did not let go right away. "And one more thing. Theodore Langston likes his courtroom the way he likes his golf swing—fast and unchallenged. He will give you no more than he promised. Do not waste a second of it."
Marcus took the book. It was heavier than it looked.
The filing took eleven minutes. Marcus walked into the clerk's office at the county courthouse with a one-page notice of appearance, his bar card, and the supreme court's order of limited admission. The deputy clerk read the order twice, looked at Marcus, looked at the order again, and stamped it.
"Good luck, counselor," she said, and something in her voice told him she meant it.
He walked home the long way, past Cedar Grove Elementary, where his grandmother had taught reading for forty-one years, past the courthouse with its white columns, past the block where the Cedar Hollow Reserve would rise if Whitmore had his way. At the corner of Magnolia he stopped and looked back at the courthouse dome against the sky, and he thought about his great-grandfather walking these same streets seventy years ago with a deed in his pocket and no lawyer at his side. The treatise was heavy in his briefcase. The afternoon was warm. Somewhere a lawn mower hummed, ordinary as breathing, and Marcus understood, with a clarity that surprised him, that ordinary was exactly what he was fighting for. At home, Rosa was waiting on the porch.
"It is done," he said. "I am counsel of record."
She nodded, and her eyes were bright, and he could not tell whether it was fear or pride, and he suspected it was both, the way it always is with grandmothers. She stood and straightened his lapels the way she had straightened them a hundred times, her hands lingering a moment on the navy wool.
"Your uncle Nathaniel wore this suit to his first job interview," she said. "He was twenty-two and scared to death, and he got the job. He always said the suit did half the talking."
"It is a little big," Marcus said.
"Baby, everything is a little big right now." She smoothed the shoulder. "You will grow into it."
That night, lying in bed, Marcus listened to the house settle around him—the creak of the stairs his great-grandfather had built, the tick of the radiators, the faint hum of the streetlight outside his window. He thought about Professor Marsh's warning, and about Crane's thirty years, and about the thirteen years he had lived, most of them in this house, under this roof.
He was afraid. He let himself be afraid for exactly one minute, the way his grandmother had taught him to let himself cry for exactly one minute when he was small and then wash his face. Then he got up, turned on the lamp, and opened the file he had started on Whitmore Development Group.
On the first page he wrote four words, and underlined them: "Four pillars. Ten minutes." Below that, he began to write. The lamp burned until nearly dawn, and when Rosa came downstairs in the morning, she found him asleep at the kitchen table with his cheek on his legal pad, the pen still in his hand, and she covered him with the afghan from the couch and stood looking at him for a long time before she started the coffee.