~ROWAN's POV~
He sat with the Vantage challenge alone for one hour.
He had asked Elara for the time, not in those words, but she had looked at his face after their conversation in the kitchen and had quietly collected her laptop and her coffee and gone back to her wing, which was the kind of reading-the-room that he had stopped being surprised by and had started being grateful for.
He sat at his desk with the legal challenge and a yellow legal pad and worked through it the way he worked through everything that mattered: methodically, without emotion, following each branch to its end before returning to the trunk.
The legal counter-argument Patricia had sketched was solid. Intent at inception was distinguishable from conduct throughout. The marriage had been maintained in good faith. Th
