Sebastian took Margaret's counsel seriously enough to request a private meeting with Aldric the following week, deliberately separate from any lawyer or board proceeding, a conversation he described to Wren beforehand as an attempt to address the actual grievance rather than continue relitigating its most recent symptom.
"I don't know if it will work," he admitted, the morning of the meeting. "Aldric's spent a year building a case against my judgment. I don't know if a single conversation undoes that, or if it's even meant to. But Margaret's right that continuing to win the same argument over and over isn't actually solving anything. I'd rather try something that might."
He met Aldric at a restaurant neither of them had any particular history with, a deliberately neutral choice, and rela
