$500,000. Her dogs. Everything she had rebuilt.
She got up, washed her coffee mug, dried it carefully, and put it back in the cabinet. Then she went upstairs and knocked on Finn's door. He was lying on his bed reading a book, Zeus curled enormous and unbothered at his feet. He looked up when she came in and must have read something in her face, because he sat up immediately and put the book down.
Jade sat on the edge of the bed. She had always believed in telling him the truth. Not every detail, not always—he was 10 years old, and some things were hers to carry—but the shape of the truth, the honest shape of it.
"The officer from yesterday," she said, "he's trying to use the law to punish me for not backing down. He's filing papers that say Zeus and Ares are dangerous, that they should be taken away."
Finn went very still. "Can he do that?" he asked.
"He's trying to," Jade said. "There are people helping him do it. Powerful people who think that if they push hard enough, I'll quit."
"Will you?"
She looked at her son: his father's eyes, her own jaw. "No," she said.
He thought about that for a moment. Then: "Are Zeus and Ares going to be okay?"
"I have a very good attorney," Jade said carefully. "And we are going to fight this with everything we have."
It was not a yes. He was smart enough to hear that. But he was also 10, and he trusted her the way children trust the one person who has never once let them down. And so he nodded slowly and reached down to rest his hand on Zeus's back. Zeus did not move; he just exhaled long and slow, like he was agreeing with all of it.
That afternoon, Jade sat back down at her kitchen table with her laptop open. She pulled up the messages she had been collecting from Clover Ridge residents: 14 testimonies, 14 names, 14 dates. She thought about what Marcus had said: "Let me work." She thought about what Derek used to say: "You cannot fight a battle you do not fully understand." She thought about Harlan's voice in that parking lot: flat, dismissive, certain that she would shrink.
Then she opened a new document and began writing down every single detail she remembered from the morning of the confrontation: location, exact words, exact movements—in the precise, orderly way the Army had taught her to document an incident. If they wanted a fight, she was going to be ready for one.