Not a trial.
A settlement — the insurer, having read the hospital intake and the guard in the box, decided a jury would not enjoy the phrase “equipment failure,” and paid, and pursued Vincent for it separately, which Cordelia says is “the insurance industry’s version of a grudge.”
I didn’t go to the settlement conference.
Rosalie did.
She’s not a party.
She sat in the hallway with a loaf in a paper bag, and when Vincent came out she handed it to him.
“From Graziella,” she said.
“She’d have wanted you to have one.
She always said a man should eat something the day he finds out who fed him.”
He took it.
He didn’t say anything.
Rosalie told me he stood in the hallway holding a loaf of bread for a full minute, and then he put it in his briefcase, and she said, “Toni, that’s the first thing of hers he ever carried.”
