The question of what Vale Industries actually owed the Calloway family, in concrete financial terms, occupied the better part of January, and Wren found herself, somewhat to her own surprise, seated at the table for most of the negotiations, not merely as an interested party but as someone Sebastian insisted needed a genuine voice in decisions that would shape her own family's future.
"There's no legal precedent that fits this cleanly," Priya Nasser explained, during one of the early strategy sessions, laying out a set of financial models across the conference table with the careful precision of a lawyer who had clearly spent weeks researching a problem with no existing template. "If this were a straightforward patent dispute litigated in real time, we could calculate damages against the
