"A formal criminal complaint has been filed against you: obstruction of a police investigation, the parking lot incident."
The kitchen was absolutely silent.
"Jade—"
"I heard you," she said.
"If it goes to prosecution and you are convicted, even a misdemeanor, your federal K9 contractor license is automatically revoked. Your contract, your income, everything you have built since leaving the Army."
She looked out the kitchen window. Finn was in the backyard throwing a tennis ball for Ares, still in his pajamas, laughing at something she was doing with her ears. Zeus was watching from the shade like a retired general observing drills.
"We fight all of it," she said.
"Yes," Marcus said. "We do. I'm calling Layla right now."
She hung up. She stayed at the window for a while; she watched her son laugh. Then she went and sat at the kitchen table, opened her legal pad, and began writing everything down: three blows in one morning—Harlan back in uniform, a legislative move to undo the one legal victory they had won, and now her career, the thing she had rebuilt from nothing, the thing that kept the lights on and put food on the table and gave her son stability after everything else had been taken, sitting on a blade's edge.
She wrote until the legal pad was half full. Then she stopped and sat with it.
The house filled up around her slowly: Finn coming in from the backyard, making himself cereal, settling at the other end of the table with his homework spread out. He had learned in the particular way that children learn the things that matter: when to talk and when to simply be present. He opened his notebook and started working without saying a word.
They sat like that for a long time. The afternoon light shifted. The dogs settled on the floor between them. Jade stared at the legal papers. She was not reading them anymore; she was somewhere past reading, somewhere in the place where everything feels simultaneously too large to hold and too important to put down.
Then Finn's voice came, quiet and certain, without looking up from his notebook: "Mom."