Nikolai's deposition was scheduled for the following Monday, and Lex spent the preceding weekend in a state of restless, unfocused dread he couldn't quite name — not fear for his father, exactly, though some old, buried part of him still flinched at the thought of watching him diminished. Something closer to a strange, unwilling anticipation, the sense of finally, after everything, being about to witness his father answer for something directly, under oath, with no room left for careful corporate language or deniable arrangements.
"You don't have to come," Ivy told him, the night before, both of them sitting on the park bench that had become, over these last months, the closest thing either of them had to neutral ground. "Ms. Alvarado said family members of the deposed party don't usually
