Dorothy held his gaze for a long moment. Then she nodded, stamped the filing, and slid it into the processing tray.
"Your father's a good man, Isaac. I hope you know what you're doing."
Word spread through the courthouse in under an hour: the janitor's kid filed a motion to play lawyer. The jokes wrote themselves. Isaac heard them in the hallways, in the elevator, at the water fountain—whispers that weren't trying to be whispers.
"Did you hear? The mop boy wants to defend his daddy."
"He's eighteen. What's he going to do? Cite Wikipedia?"
"Sullivan's going to eat him alive."
One voice cut louder than the rest: Sullivan himself, standing in the third-floor corridor with Carson beside him. Isaac was walking toward the stairwell when he heard it.
"Let the boy play lawyer. It'll be over in ten minutes. Might even be entertaining."
Carson laughed. "Should we even prepare?"
Sullivan straightened his tie. "For what? He's a kid with a library card. The judge will shut it down before lunch."
Isaac kept walking. He didn't turn around, didn't react, but he heard every word, and he filed every word in the same place he filed case law: in the part of his brain that never forgot.
That night, Isaac began his preparation. The public library stayed open until 9:00 p.m.; Isaac was there at 3:30, right after school. He sat at a corner table with a stack of legal reference books and his yellow legal pad. He studied wrongful accusation cases, evidence tampering precedents, chain of custody procedures, cross-examination techniques. He read about how prosecutors build narratives and how those narratives fall apart when the evidence doesn't match.
He reviewed the courthouse building layout from memory. He'd walked those halls a hundred times visiting his father. He knew which cameras covered which corridors. He knew where the blind spots were. He knew the IT room was on the second floor, east wing. And he knew his father was never assigned to clean that floor.
He wrote his opening statement on the legal pad, crossed it out, wrote it again, crossed it out, wrote it a third time—shorter, sharper, every word earning its place.
At home, he practiced in his bedroom, standing in front of the mirror, delivering his arguments to his own reflection. Amara appeared in the doorway once, holding a glass of water.
"What are you doing?"