MasukAdrian decided to contact Marcus Webb directly rather than let the entire conflict play out through intermediaries and legal filings alone — a professional courtesy, he told himself, acknowledging that they now operated in the same market whether either of them had chosen it deliberately or not. He
The strategy came together over the following two weeks, built in the particular rhythm Sophia had come to recognize as how she and Adrian worked best together — not in the same room most of the time, but in constant, deliberate contact, each of them handling the piece that actually belonged to thei
Marcus Webb had been Adrian's attorney for seven years. He'd represented Kane Group through its restructuring years earlier, and then through the early stages of the divorce, before Adrian had instructed him to give Sophia everything without contest — a decision Webb had pushed back against more for
Spring in Portland was emphatic. Not like the tentative spring Adrian remembered from Chicago, nor the gradual, hesitant one Sophia recalled from her childhood elsewhere — Portland spring arrived as though it had been held back deliberately and then released all at once, green and loud and fully com
She told him about James Hart's email on a Friday evening in the kitchen, while Noah was upstairs in the bath doing the singing he wasn't supposed to know she could hear through the vents. She told him in the same tone she used for foundation numbers or LexNova's quarterly projections — factual, cle
She spent twenty minutes with the email before she decided what she actually felt about it. That was longer than she usually needed for most things that crossed her desk, and she allowed it to be longer, understanding that some messages deserved more than the first, easiest response a person could r







