"Don't sign anything, Dad. Don't agree to anything. I'm going to figure this out."
"Isaac—"
"I'll figure it out."
He hung up, sat at the kitchen table, and opened his law book.
Over the next three days, Isaac visited every lawyer in Greenfield he could find. Five offices, five conversations, five dead ends.
The first one charged $300 just for a consultation; Isaac had $40 in his pocket. The second one listened for two minutes, then said, "Public defender will handle it. Take a number." The third one leaned back in his chair and said the thing Isaac would never forget: "Son, nobody goes up against Garrett Sullivan and wins. Not in this town. Not ever." The fourth one didn't even let him sit down.
The fifth one was the worst. She looked at Isaac with something that might have been pity and said, "Tell your father to take the plea deal. Eighteen months. He'll be out in twelve with good behavior. It's the smart move."
The plea deal. Sullivan's office had already sent it over: plead guilty, serve eighteen months, no trial, case closed.
Isaac read it at the kitchen table that night, every word, every clause. He read it the way he read law books: slow, careful, looking for the thing that everyone else missed. And he found it.
The plea required Elijah to admit guilt on the record, permanently. A convicted felon. No courthouse would hire him again. No warehouse would take him. No landlord would rent to him. The deal didn't just take eighteen months of his father's life; it erased his future.
Sullivan knew that. That's why the deal was so clean, so fast, so generous. He wasn't offering mercy; he was buying silence.
Isaac pushed the plea deal to the edge of the table. He stared at it for a long time. Then he looked at his shelf: the law books, the sticky notes, the yellow legal pads filled with three years of handwritten case studies. He looked at Amara's door; she was asleep. He looked at the empty chair where his mother used to sit.
Then he pulled out a fresh legal pad, uncapped a pen, and started writing.
Midnight. The apartment was silent except for the radiator and the scratch of pen on paper. Isaac Ingram was done waiting for someone to save his father. He was going to do it himself.
The visiting room at Greenfield County Jail smelled like bleach and bad coffee: plastic chairs, scratched Plexiglas dividers, a phone on each side that crackled when you picked it up.
Isaac sat down. Elijah sat on the other side. He looked ten years older than he had a week ago. His shoulders slumped, his eyes were flat. The orange jumpsuit hung off him like it belonged to someone bigger, someone who hadn't stopped eating from stress.